


One thousand years I saw your face, We painted light for trees, The moon was ours

by LittleRedCosette



Series: Your daughters shall be soldiers, Your sons their patron saints [6]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Character Death, Deaf Clint Barton, Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, F/M, Falling In Love, Graphic Description, Grief/Mourning, Identity Issues, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Not Canon Compliant, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:53:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22938187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: “Hello, Bucky Barnes,” the man says, looking absolutely unperturbed by the knife tip that not-Soldier has hooked under the bone of his jaw. A drop of blood runs down his throat, catching at the corner of his clavicle.“Not my name,” not-Soldier replies through gritted teeth.The man – Hawkeye, Clint Barton, ex-SHIELD Agent, Avenger, Steve Rogers’ friend – shrugs. He’s leaning the rest of his weight properly into his bedroom door, as if hunkering down for the long haul.“Whatever you say, Twinkletoes,” Hawkeye says casually. Then he blinks, as another drop of blood drips down his neck.*He’s born James Buchanan Barnes, but he doesn’t stay that way for long.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Laura Barton, James "Bucky" Barnes & Natasha Romanov, James "Bucky" Barnes & Sam Wilson, James "Bucky" Barnes & Shuri, James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes & Tony Stark, James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton, James "Bucky" Barnes/Gabe Jones, James "Bucky" Barnes/Others
Series: Your daughters shall be soldiers, Your sons their patron saints [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1374406
Comments: 13
Kudos: 53





	One thousand years I saw your face, We painted light for trees, The moon was ours

**Author's Note:**

> This has taken so goddamn long, and I've come to the conclusion I'm never going to be 1000% satisfied, so I should post it and move on with my life. I really, really hope you like it.
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who has kudosed and commented on this series so far, it means so much to me. In particular, I need to shout out to **woodcider** , who mentioned something in a comment months and months ago, and my brain ran away with it and turned into a section of this story. Thanks for the inspiration and encouragement!
> 
> LRCxx

*

Here’s where they end up.

Bucky walks down the brightly lit hospital corridor at a clip.

There’s mud under his nails and between his fingers on his right hand and there are probably smudged streaks of it on his face, too. There’s a heavy anchor in his chest, an undeniable presence inside him. Like hunger, that gnawing in his bones, the breadline anxiety of New York City at five o’clock in the pigeon stir morning. A sling covering the gap where his left arm used to be.

There’s an acute pain in his skull: dehydration and emotional upheaval and sunstroke, despite the lateness of the hour.

He’s exhausted, and nauseous, and Clint Barton is dead.

Bucky’s footsteps falter, each time he remembers.

He’s caught, briefly, by the memory of T’Challa’s hand heavy on his right shoulder, Stark’s gaze heavier on his face.

The hospital is a hive of activity for all its apparent stillness. Voices and footsteps bleed through the walls; Bucky ignores them, the familiar and the strange. He forces his knees to bend, his feet to take his weight. He walks directly to the only door in the corridor with a guard standing outside it.

The guard in question is a member of the Dora Milaje. Bucky doesn’t know her name, but he recognises her from Princess Shuri’s workshop. She allows Bucky inside without question, which bothers him almost as much as it relieves him.

Inside the hospital room there are three men.

The first is Doctor Lawal, tall and broad and bald, with a thick, evenly trimmed beard and heavyset eyebrows to match. He’s standing at the foot of the only bed, a clipboard in both hands that he pauses mid-wave at Bucky’s entrance.

The second man is a battered, hunched Sam Wilson. He’s sitting stiffly in a hardback chair, wearing a dire expression of stoicism despite a crust of blood on his lower lip.

The third man is Steve Rogers.

 _Steve,_ his skin the colour of winter 1934, lying unconscious in the only bed. His chest and arms are bare but for two IV ports, so there’s no hiding the bloodied rows of puncture marks littering them, with another cutting right across his Adam’s apple like a collar of tooth marks.

Bucky tries and fails not to imagine what sort of tools would leave those kinds of marks as he walks to Steve’s other side, past Wilson, with his wide red-rimmed eyes and the faint bruising on his forehead that wasn’t there this morning.

Dr Lawal says, with the flat note of professionalism Bucky is coming to expect from Wakanda’s medical staff: “I was just explaining to Mr Wilson that the Captain should wake up in twelve to twenty-four hours. A time release capsule had been implanted in the back of his neck. It has been removed. It is nonfatal, but we are still testing the chemical components.”

Bucky nods, scanning Steve’s face greedily for signs of waking up. It’s not enough to distract himself from Wilson’s tremendously cautious voice as he says: “Barnes, do you –”

“How did Barton die?” Bucky asks without looking away from Steve’s ashy pallor, because there is no acceptable ending whatsoever to Wilson’s question.

Wilson’s dark eyes are weighted with accusation, and dismay.

Dr Lawal puts the clipboard down and folds his arms over his chest. He’s large, the sort of large that is closer to fatherly than imposing. When he had been removing the shattered mechanical remains of Bucky’s left shoulder socket, his rolling baritone vowels had done more good than the injections straight into his spine.

“His throat was cut,” Dr Lawal says, while Sam makes a wretched sound of protest, and Bucky looks at the open sores on Steve’s neck with blind interest. “He would have bled out in less than half a minute.”

Sam makes more of those sounds. It’s unclear if he is feeling too delicate for the details, or if he just thinks Bucky is.

There are too many cruel options to retort with, in either case. A deeply embedded instinct, a detached and soldierly mechanism buried in Bucky’s skull, naturally conjures up how deep a throat must be cut, to bleed out in less than thirty seconds. How much pressure must be applied to split the oesophagus. The direction of the blood flow, out and in and down.

Bucky lets go of the knowledge even as it nudges the fuzzy corners of his thoughts. He glances at the doctor, who is wearing a face on the sad side of calm.

“Was he tortured?” Bucky asks.

“Yes,” Dr Lawal replies.

 _“Barnes,”_ Wilson finally garbles out sternly. He looks awful small, with his arm in a cast, strapped tight to his chest with a sling and his shoulders bumping his earlobes and his eyelashes clumped together like that.

His glare is defiant and panicked. Bucky searches him, his hackles so high, his concern a force of morphed anger. It’s obvious, how Steve found so many pieces of himself in Sam Wilson. There’s an inherent hostile goodness to them both, the kind the likes of which Bucky Barnes is not attuned to.

“How’s the kid?” Bucky asks, because he’s got Wilson’s number. He sees those head bruises, he knows them. He won’t be smacked down by a professional mother hen that doesn’t even like him.

“Heartbroken,” Wilson says and Bucky lets out a startled, harsh laugh.

“Aren’t we all?” he asks, and Wilson grimaces in response.

“Gentlemen,” Dr Lawal says, curiously succeeding in making the single word sound like both a farewell and an admonishment. He puts his fingers briefly on the foot of Steve’s hospital bed, then takes his leave, closing the door firmly behind him.

There is a lengthy pause, two breaths and then a third, during which Bucky looks at Steve’s hand and pretends Wilson is literally anywhere else and pretends he doesn’t know exactly what it feels like to cut a man’s throat.

Bucky reaches, in all kinds of ways, until he can slip his hand into Steve’s loose fingers. There are more pockmarks of injury in his forearm that Bucky carefully avoids.

“Barnes.”

Wilson’s voice is unbearably soft.

“I will break your other arm,” Bucky replies, and he means it, means it with every fibre of his being. Somebody cut Clint Barton’s throat and Bucky will gladly break Sam Wilson’s arm if he thinks he’s got a right to the inside of Bucky’s head right now.

Out of the corner of his eyes, Bucky sees Wilson nod before standing up.

He stops in the doorway, visibly running through all kinds of things to say, maybe weighing them up against how fast Bucky could reach him before he could make it out the door. That hostile goodness, Bucky lived with it for so long, the rage of a futile do-gooder. Jesus, where does Steve get off, finding these assholes?

A hollow lump widens in the back of Bucky’s throat, until his jaw no longer feels right in his face.

Wilson says: “He was a good man. I’m sorry.”

He leaves before Bucky can correct him.

That’s the thing about people like Steve Rogers, like Sam Wilson, Bucky thinks as he curls his fingers in Steve’s palm, still running hot as a fever, like all those nights spent clinging for warmth with Steve Personal-Furnace Rogers in the middle of the Howling Huddlers, which Bucky’s senses remember better than his mind: the mud, and the damp, and the cigarette tang; the sourness of infected cuts and the sweetness of corpses burning.

That’s the thing about them. They look at a man who does good things and they see a good man. They don’t entertain the possibility of a man not designed for good, simply trying to be better.

Bucky knows it, though. He recognises it from shards of mirrors glanced into, the reflection in Clint’s eyes of all the things they did, and all the things they should’ve done. Recognises the face of a man who tries hard to be better than what comes naturally to him.

Recognised. _Recognised._

 _Hey, you,_ Clint said, that grey glitter grin. Saw right through him to the bones cut up and reset, saw all the way to his very being.

Bucky leans forward, to put his forehead on Steve’s wrist, soaking up his fever heat. Breathes in the smell of him, chemicals and copper, and winter 1934.

Eleven hours later, Steve wakes up.

*

Steve wakes up, and he says: _He loved you._

It’s an insult, is what it is. It’s insulting.

Like Bucky didn’t know. Like it won’t dog Bucky for the rest of his already too long goddamned life.

Bucky loved him, too.

*

He’s born James Buchanan Barnes, but he doesn’t stay that way for long.

Bucky carries names inside his head. Distorted vowels and consonants in sixteen languages or more.

Some of them – faces, the features of how they saw him, the rosy glasses through which they knew who he was. The silhouette of him, unchanging, the moonlight of their attention mangling his shape.

James, and JB, and Bucky, and Barnes. James Buchanan. James Barnes. Handsome, and Sweet Boy, and Good Boy, and That Boy, and Nice Guy, and Wise Guy, and Smartass. Sweetheart, Dearest, Kid. Harry and Freddie and Thomas and John. Private, Sergeant, Sarge, Sir. Insolent Fucking Asshole.

Buck.

You.

He’s had a lot of names.

He carries them, all his previous iterations. The people he’s been before, outgrown and outrun and outlasted.

 _(Hey, you,_ and he smiles, all the best bits of himself. Never had to be anything but who he was, when his name was _You.)_

He’s born James Buchanan Barnes.

_Bucky Barnes._

He scribbles it on his school book and has no idea that almost a hundred years in the future, that very name will be written in big white letters in an exhibit in a museum. His likeness, printed black and white, above originals of a few grubby fisted letters he’ll write home to Brooklyn from the trenches of Europe.

He scratches it out into a piece of spare fencing that’s resting against a haystack, inside a neglected barn in a missing stretch of Midwestern miles. It fits there, neatly, carefully. He fits there.

It’s an unexpected thing.

*

Bucky is born in 1917, when the world is at war with itself, within itself. He grows up amidst a world that is healing, a city that is growing.

He dies.

He dies in 1943, when they drag him by his legs out of the cage and he gets one last glimpse of Dugan’s fingers tight in Jones’ arm before a boot to the head knocks him out cold and he spends days in a white hot temper that must mean the devil had need for him, after all.

He dies in 1945, when he falls over a thousand metres into a snowy ravine with one last glimpse of Steve Rogers’ panic-stricken face before the violent bite of frozen wasteland claims his ghost.

He dies in 1945, with one arm torn off and the other dislocated at every joint to keep him down while a ringing, angry laugh of a voice reads out Captain America’s obituary like a comedy routine, harsh vowels and consonants sticking in his ears as he closes his eyes and succumbs to the infection coursing through his boiling blood.

He dies, and he dies, and he dies, and it stops meaning anything somewhere down the line. It stops being a fate. It’s an incidental thing, death.

He dies in 2018 and he’s dead for five whole years and when he wakes up, everything is different, yet nothing has changed. Steve’s blue eyes are sad like they’ve always been, and Bucky’s heart still hurts inside his ribcage with every thumping stutter, and the world continues to turn with vibrant indifference to them both.

He wakes up after five years in the blink of an eye, and soon after Tony Stark is dead. It’s a death that brings nothing to Bucky, not relief, or regret, or remorse. An incidental thing, death. Bucky knows it intimately, just like he knows Tony Stark wouldn’t give a damn what Bucky Barnes thought about it. They buried their hatchet together, three arms between them, and they did it as peacefully as they were ever going to.

Bucky wears black to the funeral, and grieves the shadows in his best friend’s eyes instead.

“I know what I’ve got to do,” Steve tells him, and Bucky looks at him. Steve Rogers, his best friend, the best he ever had or could have. Measured by the hostile goodness in his bones. It hurts to see Steve hurting, but it feels as if that’s all they’ve done. Years of hurt between them, watching each other, just watching.

“Me too,” Bucky replies and when Steve looks at him with curiosity, Bucky just shakes his head. He reaches over and puts his hand on the leather armguard strapped to Steve’s forearm. He’s got a matching one of his own and he almost laughs, because he can _hear_ Clint, hear him as if he were sitting between them.

_Jesus Twinkletoes, what’s next, matching anklets? I’ll get you a couple of eternity rings if you like._

Bucky smiles, despite himself.

Steve, bemused, smiles back. It’s a weak thing, full of saltwater and resignation.

Used to be, Bucky could look at this man and know every little thing passing through his head. He hasn’t got a goddamn clue what Steve’s thinking right now, hasn’t got a clue what he knows he’s got to do, only that he’ll back him all the way, because that’s what they were put on this cloven earth to do.

*

Bucky knows what he’s got to do. What he’s wanted to do for a very long time.

*

It happens like this.

The day after Tony Stark’s funeral, when the world is repairing itself in increments, Bucky takes his leave.

It’s late by the time Bucky reaches his destination.

The unyielding, unflappable Pepper Potts had made her reservations about his decision perfectly clear even as she wrote out the address on the back of a photograph and handed it to him with a flourish in her arm and a dare in her eyes. The photo had hurt more than her thinly veiled mistrust.

He wonders for a brief moment where she found it, why she had it, but then he realizes, and he blinks away an embarrassing sting in his retinas. She looks, not apologetic, but appreciative. Understanding. Of course she understands – they understand each other very well, now, don’t they?

Steve offers to go with him, which is weird, and Wilson offers as well which is definitely weirder. Wanda gives him a sharp look that clearly states: _I’ll go with you if you make me._ Only, Bucky wouldn’t dream of it. Doesn’t ever want to make Wanda do anything she doesn’t want to, and besides, he doesn’t want anyone with him.

This is for _him,_ and him alone. This is Bucky Barnes, being the most selfish he can bring himself to be.

So, he props the photo up facing outwards on the control panel of the gifted Wakandan jet that had earned a jealous grumble from Wilson and a loud whistle of glee from the Parker kid, and he flies out in stealth mode, all the way across gold green plains of the US of A, and lands silently in a dusty stretch of Californian coast.

The house isn’t half as remote as their last one. They practically have _neighbors_ here, which is good, if a little sore to think on.

Bucky tucks the photo into the back pocket of his jeans, triple checks the tracking has been disabled from the jet, then strides out into the evening light with determination and only the smallest of flinches.

The house is big – big for two people, even worse for just the one.

Bucky approaches it from the side angle, southeast, and walks anticlockwise along the perimeter of the veranda surrounding it, around the back and further, skimming the pinky of his left hand along the wooden rails. It thunks softly, metal on wood, _tap – tap – tap._

When he reaches the face of the house, he is confronted with two startling images, both of which he expected, yet remained wholly unprepared for.

The first, the gentler of the two, is the glittering azure expanse of the Pacific, so vast and long it’s as if the sky has been turned into more ocean. Gold pools outwards from the shy sun as it sinks into the hidden horizon, slotting through the invisible gap between sea and sky, staining it pastel shades.

Bucky’s breath catches, and he looks at the veranda, and then his breath disappears entirely.

Laura Shipley is sitting on the railings, like some punk teenager. Like her punkass daughter, like her punkass ex-boyfriend. She’s holding a bottle of beer in one hand and looking calmly back at Bucky as if to say: _I’ve been waiting._

He wonders if Pepper called ahead to warn her.

For a moment, the thought irks him and he feels horribly thieved. However, the thought quickly settles inside him, and he’s left hoping like hell that’s what happened, because the alternative? Shit. The alternative would mean that this is just Laura, now. Her life. Alone, drinking lager from a long-necked bottle, sitting on her porch railings, watching the hours vanish from day to dusk. He doesn’t want that to be her life now.

He couldn’t bear it.

Bucky takes a step forward, and he’s horrified to see that Laura’s dark eyes have pooled with tears as she watches him, contemplating. They sparkle on her eyelashes, diamonds on her face. She smiles, damp and radiant as the sunset.

She says: “I never thought I’d see you again, Barnes.”

Bucky feels carved up afresh. He feels empty and full.

He closes the gap between them, so that he is standing between her legs, and when he lifts his hands to grasp her thighs, her arms drop around his neck in a koala clutch. The beer bottle spills on the ground in a fizzy hiss of bubbles as Laura allows herself to be pulled off the rails of her porch, so that her legs are tightly wrapped around Bucky’s waist, their noses nudging into each other’s necks, sharing warmth and scent and sadness.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, because he is.

She cries and chuckles wetly into his throat, grasping his hair, and his shoulders, and his back. She mumbles _“Don’t be stupid”_ and they laugh together, laugh in the light of the sun and the heat of the evening.

They share the weight of their loss.

For the first time, it’s almost easy to bear.

*

When the time comes, before the end of the world but after the end of something just as big, this is how an armistice is forged:

Bucky stays in Wakanda, where he can embrace a stillness that isn’t predatory, a calm that isn’t frozen.

He takes care of the goats. He gives them stupid anglicised names like Bluebell and Henry and Goldilocks, because he likes listening to Princess Shuri shout and call him _Idiotic Coloniser_ while saying absurd things like _These are Wakandan goats!_

Bucky tells her: _And I’m not a Bronco, yet here we are,_ which only serves to prompt more shrill bellowing.

He calls the prettiest goat Shuri Junior, and Shuri threatens to put him back in cryofreeze, which Bucky tries to tell her isn’t funny yet but it mostly is.

He calls the most reckless goat Barton, and Shuri doesn’t say anything about that one, which might be worse than insensitive cryofreeze jokes.

He takes care of the goats, and one day, his solitude is interrupted.

Tony Stark, the man of titanium-alloy-not-iron-thank-you-kindly, arrives. He shows up without warning, without permission, which shouldn’t be surprising but somehow it still is. He’s suited up in clinking gold and red, and he steps out of its unfolded shell as if through a waterfall, or a sheet of glass.

Bucky’s still down an arm.

“So, is there a gravestone or something?” Stark asks, brushing his hands together as if he can ever wipe them clean and shifting his eyes left to right to left, like he can see ghosts in the dust particles kicked up by the wind that’s whispering his hair out of place.

Bucky cocks his head to the side, scrutinizing his intruder with candour.

He thinks about asking: _Why, you wanna piss on it?_

Before he can, though, Stark’s eyes drop to the ground. It could almost be mistaken for submission. He looks ashamed, and Bucky is hollowed out to realise it, when he reaches deep in his soul for his anger and finds nothing but forgiveness in the well where his grief resides.

*

Wilson tells him, later on: “You know, I don’t think anybody would be opposed to having a proper funeral for Clint.”

Bucky tries to imagine it for all of half a second. Half a second of indulgence, undressing the wound of what it felt like to lose the first person he ever chose one hundred percent for himself, whose name wasn’t Steve Fight-Me Rogers, and it hurts in ways he wasn’t sure he could hurt anymore. He nearly laughs.

Clint would’ve laughed, he thinks to himself, as he says: “I can’t think of anything worse.”

(He can, of course he can. He’s lived worse. He’s lived it.)

“How’d it happen?” Sam Wilson asks, and immediately panics, as if worried he’s stepped too far a liberty with his question.

Bucky smiles, or maybe he grimaces. It’s hard to tell the difference, some days. Hard to keep track. He looks across the grassy bank, looks towards Steven Grant Rogers, Captain America, little-big punk _Stevie._ He’s crouched muddy kneed on the sparsely populated grass as he crowns Queen Morgan with a floral wreath of daisies they’ve just linked up in a crown together, his big hands carefully folding over her tiny fingers to teach her.

The Stark girl laughs as she claps her palms together, and behind her, her mother’s eyes close painfully at the sound.

Bucky looks away, and sees instead in his mind’s eye a suntan grinning face. A girl, older that Morgan Stark, with grey eyes and dark hair, her arms looped around her dad – her _dad,_ his twilight smile, a patience inside him so familiar it was as if Bucky had known it all his life.

How’d it happen?

A warm hand on his diaphragm, another hooked around his neck. A mouth on his jaw, his knuckles, his thigh. The silhouette of a sniper at his window, keeping watch, a weight beside him on a hard-sprung mattress.

“How does anything happen?” Bucky responds with an ache yawning in the back of his throat, wide as a wail. “It just did.”

Sam’s still watching him. He can feel it.

Bucky doesn’t much like Sam Wilson, for a hell of a lot of reasons, most of which he wouldn’t admit to in a million years, not even to himself. There are real reasons, and there are uncomfortable reasons, but there are mostly petty, disorganised reasons. When Sam Wilson looks at him, Bucky hasn’t the faintest clue what he sees, but he doubts it’s anything good. Doubts it’s more than the face of a man who ripped his wings apart and shoved him off a helicarrier and then never actually got around to apologising for it.

He imagines a hand, pressing lightly at the gap between his shoulder blades, soft as the sun that’s laying blankets of yellow over Stark’s funeral.

How’d it happen?

Bucky doesn’t know, exactly.

 _It’s alright to love him,_ she said, and Bucky blushed crimson like a schoolboy who’d never so much as heard of HYDRA in all his short, short life. Laura, Laura Shipley, that knowing look of hers, scrubbing wood with staining varnish, squeezing lemon into pitchers of tea, ignoring Bucky’s harsh denials, all with the same deliberate fervour.

How’d it happen?

Like this. Bucky had opened his eyes, and suddenly there he was, like he had been every day before for weeks, for months. Clint Barton. Clint, scowling at the eggs stuck to the pan, soap in his hair, wearing a Black Widow merch sweater and jeans worn through to threads at the knees. Lying on his back in a murky motel room, his fingers dusty with icing sugar and his eyes glittering grey.

 _Hey, you,_ he said, all the time, like it meant something, and he meant it with everything he had, which was more than Bucky ever really deserved.

Bucky takes Sam’s shoulder and tells him, sincerely: “You’re not the worst person in the world to commiserate at a funeral with, Wilson.”

Sam looks surprised, and oddly touched, and Bucky nods his retreat before Wilson can respond with something too nice.

He walks to the water’s edge, where Wanda has been watching the trees across the other side for almost half an hour. She doesn’t speak and neither does he, but her head tilts towards him, and he feels the break of her loneliness as surely as his own. Shells cracking to let in glimpses of light.

 _I miss him, too,_ he thinks loudly, just in case she’s listening.

*

(There was a shard of time, a cold and wet slice of Europe where the trees were as tall as the mountains and the lakes froze over in thin sheets of blue. A man with a red notebook, scribbling in the margins. His smile like a smashed glass. He’d say: _My very own Azrael._ A fist in damp hair. Blood in his mouth.)

*

This is how it happens.

Or, rather, how it ends.

*

In Siberia, Bucky very nearly kills a third Stark. There’s a disgusting hattrick joke hidden in there that occurs to him, prompting an hysterical outburst of laughter from him while he’s squirming on the floor of the jet, electric shocks battering his spine from the blunt edge where his mechanical left arm used to be.

Steve flies them to Wakanda under the promise of sanctuary from its soon to be King and Bucky meets a cocky little shit called Shuri who detests being called _Your Highness_ and has absolutely zero time for _self-pitying white boys,_ which is pretty much the definition of Steve and Bucky right now, but for some reason she agrees to help them anyway. She stops the frazzled circuits in Bucky’s empty shoulder socket from burning him and he passes out from the absence of pain.

Sharon Carter, who is every bit the godsent spitfire her Aunt Peggy had been in the nineteen-forties, sends a secure message informing them of where the losing majority of the self-proclaimed _Team Capslock_ have been sent.

Steve, against all advisement, goes after them alone.

Bucky makes a light-hearted joke about losing his mind with worry and Steve gives him this promising puppyish look, so Bucky gut punches him a bit too hard in retaliation. He watches Steve go, and he waits, waits for them to come back.

Some of them do.

*

Some of them don’t.

*

It goes like this: Wilson hits the Wakandan coastline in his bird suit with a collar-burned Maximoff and the chatterbox Lang. By the time Natalia gets there, Captain America and Hawkeye are seemingly beyond all hope. She leaves in search of answers, and finds an unapologetic and desperately helpful Tony Stark. They search, and they fight, and they find. T’Challa takes his General to provide support, strictly refusing to allow Bucky to come with them, and then Stark and T’Challa return bearing two passengers, without a trace of General Okoye or Natalia to be found.

Captain America, bullet magnet, the relentless entity. He’s recovering and Hawkeye – Hawkeye.

Hawkeye.

*

 _You could go,_ Bucky had suggested, and Clint had scoffed, those hawkish eyes glinting. Kissed him to silence, the stupid motherfucking asshole.

*

When they return, bearing two passengers, T’Challa, the man who will be King, steps out of his jet and explains that Steve has been sedated.

“Clint?” Bucky asks, even though he knows the answer.

T’Challa puts his hand on Bucky’s shoulder and says: “We were too late to save him.”

Bucky doesn’t feel his knees hit the concrete, only the swooping punch below his heart at T’Challa’s words. It roars inside his ears like electricity.

 _(Hey, you,_ he said, before he left, and every day before that, too. Clint, Clint Barton, Clint fucking Barton, too late the fuck _Hey you_ –)

The Wakandan climate is punishing, a burn as bad as a Russian blizzard. His skin is hurting and his guts are trembling. Bucky kneels on the ground, posing for an execution he maybe should have accepted before it could ever come to this. He is numb to it, to himself, to the footsteps around him, to everything except the heat swallowing him up.

Clint is _gone._

Too late. What does that even mean?

T’Challa’s shadow slips away without Bucky noticing until suddenly, standing in front of him is Tony Stark.

Tony Stark, wearing all black, he must be scorched as a roasted pig. He stands right there, looking much the way he did a month ago, when he ripped Bucky’s left arm off and asked him stupid questions ( _do you remember them do you even you remember you do you even remember remember them you even) –_

There’s a faint ring of a bruise around Stark’s eye, a stretched look to his face.

Jesus, he’s his daddy’s son. It hurts to look at him, maybe it always will. Bucky tried to tell him, wanted to, hopes Stark understands he meant it, in that bunker, he remembers, of course he remembers, he remembers them all, couldn’t forget if he wanted to and he couldn’t, he mustn’t, because remembering is all a person is _Hey, you_ –

“Walk away, Barnes,” Stark says, that gaudy voice, practiced at saying all manner of things. He sounds hollow, a public speaker in his soul, trained into it. Jesus H. Did Howard do that to his boy? Or was that after Howard was gone? After –

Bucky looks at him, looks at his face, into his bruised and weary eyes.

Stark holds out a fist, loose with a tremor in it as violent as the sweat that drips down his cheeks. Bucky lifts his right hand to accept his offering. The sun burns his forehead, and his right hand, and his heart.

He looks down at the crumpled earpieces in his palm. Silvery grey, those violet streaks. He’d know them anywhere.

*

Later, when Steve wakes up, he says: _He loved you._

Bucky wants to beat him back to unconsciousness, one hand tied behind his –

(Clint would’ve laughed, he thinks, in the secret spaces of his half-formed thoughts.)

*

Before that, though, when Steve isn’t awake yet, when he’s lying in a jet and Stark is standing on the landing pad while Bucky’s kneeling in front of him and the Wakandan sunshine strikes them from above, and the cacophony of the city below worms inside their ears.

Bucky, on his knees, looking at Clint’s hearing aids and wondering stupidly how he’s ever going to get them fixed. He looks up at the man before him, looks up at Tony Stark with his gaunt frown and his hunched shoulders, and figures he should ask. Beg, maybe. Plead.

Only then, from behind Stark where he stands stoic, there’s a flash of something emerging from the back of the jet – the white of a sheet that’s slipped, greying skin, crimson –

He is undone.

(It is hardly the first time.)

Bucky’s throat unleashes the only word he’s got left in his vocabulary. He screams it, a command and a reach and a war cry. The name he maybe knows best.

_“CLINT!”_

He’s on his knees, with Tony Stark blocking his path. Tries to lunge but out of nowhere, there is the cracking crunch of gold and red, Stark’s muffled voice, T’Challa’s, his own.

The next moment he’s bellowing bull’s hate and he’s high up in the air, being dragged to the clouds by fucking Iron Man. Metal arms are clasped around his waist, his legs are kicking, one fist punching and the phantom strike of the other is agony digging into his gaping shoulder socket.

For a moment, there is only the scream of the wind, the bite of metal fingers, and the drawn out tumble of falling into the pit of the Alps.

He screams like he hasn’t screamed since the last time HYDRA wiped him.

They hit the ground at some point. He feels it, through his trembling, and he smells it through his tears. The rough parched ground, he carves himself a slice of the earth to weep into, water the grass and claw at it.

He cries like he hasn’t cried since the first time HYDRA wiped him.

By the time Bucky comes to, he’s in a field, wrung out, hoarse and thawed. His eyes swelling even as they heal, rubbed raw with half-dried tears. Grass in his mouth and mud on his knees.

Iron Man’s there, still. He’s sitting close enough that Bucky can hear his shallow, dehydrated breaths.

They might have been here for minutes, or hours. Tony Stark looks at him, hollow dark eyes, pink at the edges. He says, blunt, clipped, desperate: “Black Widow is taking care of what’s left of them.”

There’s a burn of something in Bucky’s gut, like jealousy and envy and glee.

He nods, indebted, relieved. Because the Soldier, he might have been designed as a harbinger of death, but the Widow, she is suffering incarnate. If anyone can exact a punishment worthy of those animals’ crimes, it’s her. He knows, because he helped make her so.

Bucky looks out across the plains of Wakanda, towards the city, to the sky bruising gold and purple and red.

Hours. It’s been _hours._

“Steve –”

“Asleep, recovering,” Stark says sharply, tapping his ear to indicate his comms.

Bucky pulls himself up properly, a slow heaving shudder, to sit on his heels and stare at the man beside him.

Stark’s visibly discomfited, turning away to the outlines of the buildings that make up the dizzying, metropolitan oasis skyline. There’s sweat on his brow; the bridge of his nose is pink with sunburn.

“Ready to head back?” Stark asks the horizon.

Bucky swallows dryly.

Every piece of him aches. Aches like burning, like electricity, like the chair. For one terrible moment, he recalls the awful bliss of forgetting with something close to wishing. If only. It would go, go _away,_ this ache, he can’t bear it. He wants to banish it.

He wants to forget.

The shame hits him like a fist in his throat. Bucky recoils from the sudden desire for oblivion like a hand from a flame. He can’t _forget._ How could he –

He looks down at the leather band tightly bound under his right elbow, the neatly carved ridges of the markings, the loving detail, worn out over time and wear.

 _(Here,_ he’d said, _Put this on._ It’s worn, worn down over years from all the times he’d rubbed his calloused thumb over the writing –)

Bucky feels his face scrunch up, maybe fighting tears, maybe aiding them. It’s hard to tell for sure.

“No. But we should go.”

Stark looks at him, puzzled and heavy with something uncomfortably close to judgement. His flashy suit makes low clinking sounds as he stands.

He doesn’t offer to help Bucky up, for which Bucky is embarrassingly thankful.

 _(Hey, you –_ he’d said, teasing, golden, beautiful –)

Stark gives him another scrutinizing look.

“Well, I’m no courier service,” he says as he hides his face behind that blank gold mask. “You know your way back, right?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer. With one hard nod of the suit, Stark straightens his limbs in a whining whir of blasters and launches up into the sky, leaving Bucky on the ground.

Bucky doesn’t watch him leave; he looks instead at the landing pad Stark had dragged him from in the distance. It’ll take him forty minutes to walk back to the hospital from here, give or take.

He lets out a shaky sodden breath, slips the hearing aids into his pocket and rubs his hand over his wet face. Allows himself one crumbling moment, to picture Clint’s smirking salute; the sound of his laugh, the rough warmth of his hands on his hips.

Another sound catches itself on the barbs in his throat and he cuts short the wild freefall of his grief.

 _Later,_ he tells himself, he promises. _Later._ He’s got forty minutes, he reminds himself as he starts the slow, sweaty trudge back towards the city. Forty minutes to tie up all the loose, flailing threads of hurts and horrors wreaking havoc in his heart.

Steve is there, up ahead, at the end of this too short road. Steve is there and Steve is hurting, and if Steve was enough to uproot seventy years of HYDRA’s insidious programming out of his skull from the stems, then he will be enough now. He has to be.

Bucky takes another slow, blood bite breath.

Forty minutes. He can do this.

He tries not to feel too grateful for Stark’s abandonment. He tries to read it as selfish and not generous. Tries to pretend Stark didn’t know this was exactly what he wanted.

It’s a lot harder than it should be.

 _(Hey, you,_ he’d said; teasing, golden, beautiful, alive, _fuck –)_

He makes it back in seventy minutes.

*

Steve wakes up, and tells him: _He loved you._

Bucky looks at him, at his stupid face with that nose broken a thousand times and he thinks about saying: _When you died, all the way back in 1945 like we both should have, they already had me tied up in their lab. They celebrated. I watched them burn pictures of you and sing songs of your failure. Then they hacked the rest of my arm off, and I still screamed your name._

*

But, how’d it happen?

It happened something like this.

*

In the bitter February of 1945, Bucky falls. He falls from the blasted remains of a train speeding through the Alps.

He remembers only the sensation, the scoop inside him like pebbles under the ocean displaced for the first time in a thousand, thousand years. The most natural unnatural thing.

Steve is there, and then he isn’t. Or maybe, Bucky is there, and then he isn’t.

He falls through air so cold it is as if the very wind has frozen solid, the crystals scarring him as he smashes through each sheet of icy nothingness. He is drowning above water; he is lungless and afraid. He is swallowed up by the cold, and for those searing seconds he is winter incarnate in his very blood.

The train vanishes into the sky, as if God had plucked it from existence. The train, and Steve, too.

Bucky mourns a lifetime in a heartbeat.

He is unconscious before he makes impact with the ground, and that is the last small mercy he knows for a very long time.

*

And then.

And _then._

*

Seventy years later, Bucky opens his eyes very slowly. He listens to the smooth, sharp, cautious breaths of another person in the room. He turns his head, and looks at the man sitting on the chair next to his bed.

Bucky sits up, leaning into his knuckles. His left arm, metal and wire, whirs and clicks in the darkness, which is broken only by the moonlight peering through a gap in the heavy curtains from the other side of the room. He takes a deep, calming breath, and is suddenly aware that he is soaked in sweat. That he is shivering, and shrinking; that he is silently, continuously crying.

The man in the chair holds out a towel, far enough away that Bucky has to reach to take it, which he does, eventually, burying his face into the rough material, inhaling the grassy smell from letting it dry on the line outside. He wipes his cheeks and his forehead and his mouth, his neck and his chest and his arms. The man takes the towel back when he’s done, and holds out a lamb soft, woollen blanket.

Bucky folds himself into it, afraid of its comfort, of the tenderness hidden in the man’s eyes.

“I remembered something,” Bucky says after a moment, an age of ticking clocks from across the house.

Clint Barton nods, and blinks. He does not make a move to leave, or come closer, or do anything, and Bucky is immensely grateful, because he feels as if Clint could force him to do anything right now, and he would, would do almost anything at nothing more than a turn of Clint’s head.

Bucky tightens his grip on the blanket, holding the corners to the base of his throat, and he looks away from Clint’s shiny eyes, looks at the blank wall that his bed faces, and imagines he can still feel the doctor’s hands pawing at his insides.

“I tried to stop it,” he says, another moment, another age of ticking clocks.

Clint, God bless his sniper’s patience, doesn’t say a goddamn word.

“I tried to end it, before they could do anything. Stuck a scalpel in my gut.”

Bucky’s fingernails dig into the place where he cut himself open, seven merciless decades ago, without looking to see if there’s a scar. He can still feel the ice-cold burn of the metal ripping through his organs, and the frantic moment of gleeful panic, thinking himself a victor against his captors. The ruinous disappointment of waking up, made whole all over again. Arnim Zola’s harsh whisper, _I bring the world a new and brighter fire._

When Bucky looks back at his silent guard, or perhaps that’s guardian, Clint’s eyes are harder, and his mouth is softer.

“I don’t know if it was out of bravery or cowardice, though,” Bucky tells him, more sincere than any confessional his Ma shoved him in when he was a kid, which is little more than a black spot smell of wood and incense and false guilt in his sallow weed memories.

At this, Clint frowns, and he takes a pointed breath that gives Bucky the chance to shut him up, if he wants to, only, he doesn’t. He wants to hear him, wants to hear something other than his own sobbing screams rattling inside his head seven decades past.

Clint asks: “Does it have to be just one of them?”

Bucky lets out a wobbly, relieved laugh.

“No,” he chokes, and his spine curves over his knees as they tuck up to his chest, until he is the smallest he can be, these days; still feels big as a house, still feels too big for his hollow soul to take up room in. “No, I guess not.”

They sit a while longer, in a rhythm of panic and safety. Until Bucky has sweated through the blanket, too, and Clint pulls him firmly out from under the covers, wraps him up in a new blanket and presses him down into a different bed. Then he presses a very cautious kiss to the top of Bucky’s head, the way Bucky thinks perhaps he once did to different, feverish forehead.

He leaves, promising to come check on his soon and all night Bucky listens to the overly loud sounds of Clint pottering about the house, projecting his every movements with clatters and footsteps. A laundry load in the washer and the squealing of the kettle.

It’s soothing, and unfamiliar, and Bucky falls asleep to the melody of clumsy tenderness, echoing through the house.

*

“How’d it happen?” Sam asks, at Tony Stark’s funeral, when the end of the world has come and gone, and Bucky doesn’t have the words, not in his sixteen languages or more, to explain: _I don’t know how, it just did. It just happened because I needed it to, we both did. It worked. I could have done it without him, but I’m so goddamn glad I didn’t have to._

*

When Laura Shipley smiles at him, it’s the kind of smile that Bucky remembers from less difficult days; dazzled by charm instead of pity. She’s honest, in all kinds of ways, this brutal darling that he didn’t see coming, not from a thousand miles and seventy years away.

“It’s alright to love him, Barnes,” Laura says, not looking up from the half-varnished table she’s scouring burnt bronze. “Just because I didn’t, doesn’t mean I can’t see why someone would.”

Bucky’s torn between recoil and advance. He wants to object, to reject, to something-or-other. He wants to demand silly things like _I don’t love him,_ or, _It’s none of your business,_ or, _How in God’s name could you not fucking love him?_

He looks down at his hands, silver and tanned, both stained with dark wood varnish that looks and smells nothing like blood. His heart jackrabbits in his chest, but the words won’t come. There is only the piercing thought of those grey grinning eyes.

From upstairs, there’s a sudden crashing sound, followed swiftly by Clint swearing very loudly before shouting: _“I’m fine!”_

Bucky opens his mouth to say something, anything, to rebuff Laura’s grin. He wants to tell her she’s wrong, but all that comes out of his half-cocked mouth is, “I tried not to, Shipley. I tried real damn hard.”

*

Eight years later, Bucky flies to her house, and holds her in his arms, and she cries into his neck and he knows that she lied, just a little bit, that day. Lied for him, and maybe also for herself. She had loved him, too.

*

In Wakanda, Steve wakes up and says, _He loved you._

*

In Wakanda, Steve wakes up and Sam joins them. They talk, their voices rough, burnt from within.

Then, Stark walks in and before any of them can shut him up, Stark says something else.

“They made sure he died afraid, and alone, and in _agony,”_ is what Stark says to punish Steve Rogers for the crime of relentless endurance, the crime of being _Steve,_ and one day Bucky will understand the sheer, unadulterated pain in Tony Stark’s voice in that moment, but at the time it’s worse than getting his arm ripped off all over again. The easy, sliding snake of Stark’s insidious verbal weaponry.

Stark leaves, and Sam trails after him, battered peacekeeper stuck on repeat. He hasn’t figured it out yet, how hopeless it is, to befriend unstoppable forces and immoveable objects and expect them to get along.

They leave Bucky to Steve’s misery and mercy, and Steve can’t think of anything better to say than _He loved you,_ which hurts because it’s like Steve thinks maybe Bucky didn’t fucking know that already, wasn’t as aware of it as the blood in his veins and the wires in his spine.

The Avengers are no more.

They are broken up, disbanded to far flung corners of despondency, left to lick their wounds in private.

Sam says, in the following days, “Hawkeye would have hated you arguing about him like that.”

Bucky doesn’t correct him. He looks across the table busy with exiled once-upon-a-time heroes, full of untouched food, rolling a ripe orange in his right hand, thumbing the peel without tearing it. Natalia stares back at him, with sharp green eyes that share the truth he keeps tucked behind his teeth.

 _Hated?_ He wants to scoff at Sam, who hasn’t the first clue. _Hated? No, Hawkeye would have blamed himself._

Bucky doesn’t, though. He keeps his nastiest thoughts hidden behind his scowl, because Steve’s sitting at the other end of the table, frowning at his banana like he’s forgotten how to eat it. Or, rather, Captain America’s sitting at the other end of the table, frowning at his banana like he never wants to eat again.

“Drop it, Wilson,” he says when Sam opens his mouth again, and to the astonishment of everyone including perhaps himself, Wilson does.

Steve tries to give Bucky a grateful smile when nobody’s looking, but Bucky doesn’t have it in him to smile back. When he moves his foot an inch to the right, he runs it straight into Natalia’s extended insole, and he’s shocked but he doesn’t show it. She doesn’t move away.

Bucky studies her through the barrier of his eyelashes, and makes inappropriate comparisons in his head to pass the time.

*

 _(Sarge,_ they called him. On the face of every 107th Private, he was an upturned brow, a question they couldn’t face asking someone more senior, and figured their Sergeant might at least answer before laughing at them. Half the time, he was nothing more or less than a relieved sigh as he lied about the accuracy of Kraut marksmen. It wasn’t always good, being _Sarge,_ but he knew how to do it. It came easy, being _Sarge._ Easier than being _Sergeant Barnes,_ at least.)

*

Becca always said: _You’ve got love to spare, JB. You should spend it wisely._

Bucky would smile at her, dopey endorphins and piss weak coffee, and tell her she was the prettiest dame in Brooklyn.

She had a wasp sting in her words, the oldest of Bucky’s little sisters. She was the sleeves up, soles scuffed kind, with their Ma’s dark eyes and striking cheekbones. He’d tell her: _Gotta marry him fast, doll, before he finds out about that personality of yours._

The last letter he ever got from her, a month before he fell to a fate unkinder than death. She mentioned a _sweet fella called Donny. You’ll hate him, I just know it, but JB, I love him, I think I really do._

*

Seven decades later, Bucky goes to the Smithsonian, and he stares at a picture of his own face.

Close by, there’s a photo of a tall woman with dark eyes and striking cheekbones, holding a toddler on her hip, a man beside her with his arm around her shoulders.

 _Gifted to The Smithsonian by Mrs Rebecca Joan Corello,_ the small plaque says above an exhibit of trinkets that supposedly summarises the man called James Buchanan Barnes, who is as unfamiliar to him as the baby in his sister’s arms.

*

It’s a fight, clawing back the remnants of Bucky Barnes. Separating the pieces of him carried inside, oil and water, milk and lemon juice. James Buchanan who was Sarge who was Good Boy who was Soldat who was Buck who was JB who was Asset. Like digging out a bullet splinter with his bare hands, tearing himself open in the hope of finding something worth the struggle.

It’s always been a fight, ever since the beginning.

Maybe that’s what he was put here to do.

Maybe that’s just what he is.

*

He retreats. In his new beginning, which is the fall of HYDRA, and of SHIELD, he retreats, and maybe he feels like a coward for it. He leaves the pile of muscles and bones that he knows make up somebody important by the edge of the Potomac and he retreats. A wounded chimaera, the downtrodden little brother of Cerberus, sullenly fleeing into the darkest of shadows, out of reach.

It’s strategic. Tactical.

It’s his right to, because he’s not _theirs,_ not anymore.

He never was. He only forgot.

There’s a name in his head _(Soldat)_ and he knows it better than any other _(Soldat)_ he screamed it _(Soldat)_ into the abyss that stretched out _(Soldat)_ before him _(Soldat)_ like oblivion in God’s _(Soldat)_ hands.

He retreats, because he deserves to.

He’s not theirs anymore.

*

Becca always said, _You’ve got love to spare, JB._

She did, too, is the thing.

She had a son, and she called him James.

*

In 1970, the Winter Soldier is woken up.

He goes to Marseille, and to Plovdiv, and to Bucharest.

He’s cleaning the blood from a blade he pulled out of his fourth assailant’s hands when he hears something. A voice, speaking English, in an American tongue.

_You’re taking all the stupid with you._

The knife slips through his fingers, the serrated blade catching in the thumb joint of his right hand. Blood bubbles up in the dragged rip, a thin trickle sliding down his wrist. The Soldier looks back around, through the doorway, to the dead men on the floor, all six of them.

He stares hard at number two, his boyish face, his blond hair. There’s nothing familiar about him.

All the same, the Soldier looks at him again as he leaves.

*

He returns to the base, to his handlers. Opens his mouth as they dig into the whirring mechanics of the metal arm. They strap him down, burnt rubber on his tongue, and the last thing he sees before the surge sweeps him away is the dead blond man in Bucharest.

*

“I don’t think there’s a time frame for this kind of thing,” the man says, looking soft and tough and totally out of his depth.

He’s holding two mugs, one full of black coffee and the other white tea. His hair is crumpled like a thatch roof on his head, spilled over onto his tanned face, into his hawk-storm eyes.

“We just keep going,” the man says.

Hawkeye.

Hawkeye says.

(He’s not _Clint_ yet, but he will be.)

*

Steve wakes up, and tells him: _He loved you._

Bucky looks at him, his best friend, the best friend he ever had. And Bucky mourns. Mourns a life he should have lived, nothing but petticoats and cigarettes and discontented normalcy. He mourns the things he wanted, and the things he didn’t.

*

Perhaps this is how it really happens.

A hotel room in London. A cramped little thing with carpets the colour of poltergeists and lots of leaflets on the dresser for an amusement wax model museum called Madame Tussauds that sounds, quite frankly, terrifying. Except for the part about the wax model Captain America – that one, Bucky would kind of like to see. Roll his eyes at a little. Make fun of the costume, the way he used to be able to.

Steve’s on his way. He’ll be here soon, he’s coming, but they have this. A moment, a stolen one, grasped with both hands and clung to because who knows when the next one will be. They share oxygen like treasure, space like secrets.

Bucky’s got paranoia gnawing on his spine and guilt pressing heavy on his lungs but Clint is there, stealing it back, carrying it effortless like the draw of his bow. His hands are big on Bucky’s neck, his forehead warm pressed against his own.

“Here,” Clint says with his wet pink mouth, letting go just long enough to tug open the straps of the dark leather band from below his left elbow. “Put this on.”

“What? No. Put that back –”

Bucky wants to say: _Don’t be an idiot._ He wants to say: _That’s stupid, it’s just a stupid belt, it doesn’t mean anything, it won’t protect me._

Only, what he means is: _You need that luck more than I do. Keep it, keep it darling, keep you safe._

Clint knows, of course he knows. He’s wearing an eyeroll smirk, all kind and clever and brave. He tightens the leather brace around Bucky’s right arm, dropping his shirt sleeve back over it when he’s done. Fingertips lingering on his wrist, circling his pulse.

“See?” he says, buttercream kisses dropped onto the apples of Bucky’s cheeks. “Safe and sound.”

It’s Bucky’s turn to roll his eyes but he can’t quite manage it. Gets stuck in a grin that hurts, satisfying, like small bruises used to be, when small bruises were things that stayed long enough to be noticed on his skin. He takes hold of Clint by the waist, feels the give of muscles and ribs and presses his nose into the space below Clint’s jaw, which just might have been put there for him.

“You could go,” Bucky says, earnest, earnest like Stevie at his best, and his worst. “Go back to the farm. Teach Lila how to shoot with sticks and string. Paint the attic. I’ll come back. Be back in no time.”

“Yeah, that sounds like me,” Clint snorts, his hands clasped around Bucky’s tailbone.

When he steps back to lean against the wall, he pulls Bucky with him into the cradle of his hips.

Bucky pushes his face against Clint’s, not even a kiss, too much of everything to be one. Just sharing space like secrets between them, oxygen like treasure. He wants to be closer, wants to cage him in and keep him, wants to be on the other side of the earth, so that when he is hunted down, Clint isn’t beside him.

He says, with a sigh to make the body between him and the wall shiver: “It sounds like a retired Avenger.”

Clint’s grin splits his worries apart, sunshine between rainclouds.

“Am I retired? Are you sure? I don’t remember that.”

“There’s only room for one amnesiac in this relationship, Hawkeye.”

Clint’s mouth swallows up his chuckle with an open smile of his own. His hands are strong enough that Bucky can pretend he’s stuck here, right here, in Clint Barton’s personal space, Clint Barton’s personal everything. Bucky tells himself: _This. This is why it’s worth fighting back._

*

Only, then they get to Germany, and so does everyone else.

The last time Bucky sees him alive, Clint’s a shadow, all purple and gold, firing arrows up into the air with lethal precision.

It is, maybe, the best possible version of a last, and lasting, look.

*

It’s a long time coming, that one. Eighty years in the making.

*

Bucky was never complacent about it, right from the start. Never took for granted the importance of goddamn _subtlety._ He knew better than to get complacent but he maybe got a bit stupid, sometimes. A bit eager. Got a bit too close to being one of those risktakers who enjoyed the adrenaline of how very fucking easy it would be to get beaten to death in an alley, if he wasn’t more careful.

In 1936, Bucky Barnes adds a couple of skills to his repertoire that he had suspected for a while now he might be pretty damn good at.

The man’s name is not Bill, in the same way that Bucky’s name is not Fred.

Not-Bill is probably not yet forty.

He’s lean, lean the same way Bucky is – closer to overworked than underfed. He’s handsome, Irish eyes and an Italian mouth and Bucky doesn’t wonder too hard which side of the family he ties himself to.

Not-Bill, though, he’s not handsome the way Bucky is starting to realise he is. Bucky’s used to getting called handsome, but amongst the kind of company Bucky’s in tonight, he’s not handsome at all, he’s something more like _pretty,_ and it burns him bad and heats him up good to know it, to hear it.

Not-Bill does everything with the kind of surety that comes from experience, and Bucky yields to it like barley to the wind. He does as he’s told, and he always knew he was good at that. Always took a sharp order the way others might take a polite request – others, of course, being Steve. Shit – _Steve._

But Bucky isn’t thinking about Steve tonight, because this is not something he is going to share with Steve, and there’s another skill to add to Bucky’s list, one he honest-to-hell thought he’d never cultivate. He’s never been able to keep a damn sneeze from Steve, but this, this he’ll bury in a grave with his corpse and Steve won’t know a goddamn thing about it, because Bucky can’t ever see that sort of shame in Steve Rogers’ eyes.

He doesn’t ever want Steve to know this version of himself.

This Bucky Barnes, who isn’t Bucky, but Fred, or John, or Thomas. The one who so easily takes what he’s given, and gives it back; bends like barley to the wind under a strange man’s forceful grip, with those bruises on his knees hitching his breath in a good-selfish-hungry way every time he feels them. The fear when a hand pulls his hair in a solid yank little more than an excited, anticipatory flutter.

Bucky Barnes has a lot of skills, and he uses them to great effect, and by the time he stumbles out into the night’s soaking street, the wind has picked up and it leaves him shivering hard enough to distract him from any of the other aches and pains that waylay his salt slick body.

He’s learning things. Things about himself, about what he is capable of, what he can do. What he wants to do.

What he wants.

He’s learning, and the thing about Bucky Barnes is, he’s always been a fast learner. So when he finally stumbles out into the night’s soaking street with nothing more or less than a _Good – Good boy – You’re good Freddie –_ and his clothes are sticking uncomfortably to his loose limb muscles, he knows twenty things more about himself than he really thinks he needed to know.

He’s all sweat and saliva, hair shoved back off his face with rough palms and his wet bruised mouth stinging in the cold air. He’s burning up, inside and out.

Bucky walks home, shuffling, all angles like that sprained ankle down the fire escape last month.

He’s been renting a room further east than he’s used to, ever since realising that the crowded anxiety of his folks’ home would be a whole lot less unbearable without Bucky and his Pa ramming horns every day. It was time. He was doing more harm with his presence than good with his extra income.

Bucky knows he’s been god-gifted with his father’s temper. Knows he’s gonna break his Ma’s heart one day.

But Winifred Barnes has been broken-hearted before, and Bucky isn’t stupid enough to think even his stubbornness can do what a lifetime of hardships has yet to manage where his Ma’s spirit is concerned.

The room he’s renting – the _drafty-box-but-hey-no-mice!_ Steve had called it – is on the second floor of a decades past mixed boardhouse. The landlord, Jacob, is scheduled his sainthood any day now.

Bucky slips inside, quiet as a ghost, and sneaks up the stairs, making sure to skip steps two, four and seven to avoid the worst of the creaks. Sweat drips down his face and his neck and the backs of his legs, and just as he’s rooting in a threadbare pocket for his key, he hears a scuffling behind him, and he near enough leaps out of his raw skin when he hears a brittle voice say:

“That you, James Barnes?”

Bucky swivels, nearly losing his balance when his shoulder catches on his doorframe, sending a jolting pain up his spine.

“Mrs Rafferty – hi – Janet,” he says in a cracked voice, correcting himself quickly before she can.

Bucky knows as well as everyone else in the building that the closest Janet Rafferty has ever come to being a Mrs was the dolls she dressed up in white as a child, whatever the burnished gold on her left hand suggests.

Except, Janet Rafferty has a sick three year old daughter, and life’s hard enough on down-on-luck widows. There’s just no sense in making more trouble for a person than they deserve, especially when the world is doing such a good job already. She’s beautifully plain, if a little haggard around the edges, and looking over Bucky worriedly she reveals some of her youngness despite the lines creasing up her eyes.

“Hoped I’d catch you,” Janet says, stepping a little closer and Bucky tries his best not to look obvious about it when he leans back. He has never been more aware of the redness of his face. He can still feel the scratch of not-Bill’s beard on the back of his neck.

“Oh?” he asks, an octave too high and he coughs roughly.

“A woman stopped by for you,” Janet says, seemingly without noticing. “Left you this.”

She holds up a small squarish object wrapped in brown paper without string, held together by clever folds in the paper that Bucky would recognise anywhere. His heart sinks in his chest.

Janet holds it out to him.

“Said her name was Sarah,” she says with a strange smile. “Seemed a little old for you, I must say, James.”

Bucky lets out an uncomfortable chuckle that lodges itself stubbornly in his throat. He hides behind the brown paper to cough again, attempting to subtly wiping at his damp mouth.

“She’s not –” he manages. “She’s my friend’s mother. Half-raised me herself, when my own was run ragged by the little ones.”

Janet’s eyes widen, and his chin bobs with understanding, pleased by the answer.

“I see,” she says, and maybe she does. Or maybe she envies the idea of someone else taking care of a person’s kid for them, as she beds down with sickly Eleanor night after night. Bucky wouldn’t blame her – he’s never heard Janet talk about a friend, or a family member, besides Baby El.

She smiles generously at him, and Bucky can dislodge the hurting tremor jammed inside his chest. He’s caught by Janet’s closeness, worried maybe she can smell the deceit on him, and the dirt. His fingernails dig into the backs of his hands, hoping to skin him.

“How’s Eleanor?” he asks.

Janet’s eyes are very dark, and they sadden at his question. They always sadden, when he asks, but he can’t help himself.

“Oh, she’s doing OK. I got her to a doctor, a few days ago. He was very kind.”

It’s times like this – standing in his hallway in the dead of night with Janet Rafferty, hearing her talk about the kindness of a doctor who maybe at best suggested some sort of medicine she won’t ever be able to buy with anything like regularity for a little girl, that Bucky is caught by the abrupt maelstrom of realising what kind of life, or death, his best friend might’ve had, without Sarah Rogers for a mother.

He’d never tell Steve to his face, because Steve could teach a class on grudges and his temper’s like a flash flood at the best of times, but Eleanor Rafferty reminds Bucky awfully of Steve. The thinness of her chest the few times he’s held her, the brick shaking cough that echoes through the walls into Bucky’s room at all hours of the day and night.

Bucky is struck by a burning wonder of whether or not Baby El is even going to make it to her fourth birthday.

The lump in his chest swells up to his throat.

“I don’t have work tomorrow morning,” he says, abruptly, choking a little. “If you need me to watch her.”

He’s offered before, and he’ll offer again, despite the agony in Janet Rafferty’s eyes. At war between the desire to have five seconds of peace and the base instinct not to leave her baby alone with a strange young man, even a nice one like James Barnes pretends to be as best he can.

“Well – perhaps. Thank you, James.”

“I’ll be around all morning,” he tells her, already nodding and backing into his door.

“You’re a sweet boy, James,” Janet tells him.

She’s vanished into her own rooms before he can respond.

Bucky sags against his doorframe, clutching the package from Sarah Rogers and fumbling with the key to hasten inside. He’s hurting – he’s hurting all over, not just the bite mark on his shoulder and the ripping burn in his ass and the shaky ache of his legs.

The door slams shut behind him and he winces, barely makes it to sitting on the edge of his bed, gritting his teeth and hissing through the pain with his eyes scrunched shut to deny their instinctive tears. Through the walls, he can hear Eleanor Rafferty fussing and whimpering.

The brown paper unfolds beautifully, just like all Sarah Rogers’ gifts. Inside, there’s a rectangular packet. It’s a Hershey’s bar, and Bucky bites down hard on the twitching corners of his mouth as he puts it to one side and looks at the bigger item – a book.

It’s _The Last of the Mohicans,_ slightly battered, a few years old and no doubt fourth or fifth hand but – it’s lovely. Inside the cover, Sarah has written on a spare piece of paper:

_James Buchanan,_

_I’m sorry I couldn’t celebrate your birthday last week, but duty calls even for a lowly nurse. A little something for your new life as the independent young man you are becoming. I hope you enjoy this book, as a son who knows to appreciates words and not only pictures! You know it’s one of my favourites._

_Sarah Rogers_

In the very middle of the book, when he lets it fall open in his hands, are several folded single dollar bills.

Bucky feels his chest opening up, and he traps the sound clawing up his throat only by biting into the blood of his lips. His eyes burn with – something. Some hurricane of ferocious love, and shame, and devotion, and fear. It tangles around him like brambles smothering a fence, catching him with thorns.

He wants to hug Sarah Rogers tightly and promise he’ll do better.

He wants to never see her face again, for fear she’ll know he won’t succeed.

Bucky hiccoughs into the papery smell of his gift, curling painfully on his bed, and he knows he should make use of the late hour to use the shared bathroom down the hall, because he thinks there might be blood in his trousers, and he knows there’s blood on his shoulder.

Through the walls, Eleanor Rafferty wheezes loudly, loud enough to cover up Bucky’s sniffling.

He hides his face behind his book, and drops into unconsciousness on top of the blankets.

*

It’s nearly eighty years later, meandering aimlessly through the recollection of a spare childhood afternoon infiltrating the Baker boys’ game of Treasure Island in the alley behind the pawnbroker’s shop, that Bucky is pulled up short in his tattered thread story by a sudden blank spot.

Steve, who had been laughing and shaking his head in overtly false denial from his seat on the armchair while Bucky laid claim to a four-person sofa easily, quietens, cocking his head as he senses Bucky’s lost track.

“Buck?” he asks, too _nicely,_ and it rankles him but Steve doesn’t really get it, how often he uses that voice, how unhelpful it is.

Across the open counters to the dining area, Clint has his back to them as he pretends to be reading through fresh mission plans for Natasha. Steve has yet to notice the papers are in actual fact middle school maths homework that Clint is checking over with a snarky pencil, writing things like: _ROCKSTAR, you know what a vector is do not even start with me right now._

Bucky’s not convinced this is an appropriate way to convince your teenage daughter to try harder in school, but what does he know? He’s just _Bucky,_ who can’t braid hair well but will very patiently listen to Lila Barton’s extraordinarily fascinating high school woes, which include but are not limited to: being too smart for her class, being too cool to be smart, being too good at everything to join a team sport, and being the victim of a longstanding grudge held by Mr Weissman, who is, quote unquote, _Just jealous._

Of what, Bucky isn’t sure.

Regardless, Steve is trusting enough of Clint’s determined manner to not question when he says he has important shit to do.

Meanwhile, Clint is trusting enough of Bucky’s unreliable ability to ask for help that when Bucky _does_ stumble into a roadblock, and Steve asks _Buck?_ in that undeniably frustrating voice of kindness, he doesn’t turn around or even stop pencilling insults on his daughter’s homework.

Bucky forces himself to look away from Clint’s turned back. He tries to look at Steve, but only succeeds in looking at Steve’s clenched jaw.

He sits up properly on the couch, most of his weight leaning into his feet on the floor.

“Bucky, what is it?” Steve asks. “After sundown, when Michael Baker snuck back to our street?” he repeats back, as if hoping to jog Bucky’s memory with his own words.

Bucky swallows dryly, and says, quietly: “Y-Your _mom.”_

Even without looking properly, he sees the unmistakeable shadow of disappointment drop Steve’s features like a foot treading into long grass. His lips part, and press together, and part again. Bucky grimaces uncomfortably.

Steve lets out a horrible sigh, probably without meaning to.

“Sarah,” he says gently. “Her name was Sarah.”

Bucky nods, because he _knew_ that. He read it in a damn museum. But he hadn’t remembered – had _forgotten,_ in his bones. A prickly discomfort, rarer every month but never quite vanishing all the way, creeps over Bucky.

He doesn’t feel like talking about this anymore. The story’s over anyway and – besides. Steve remembers it all.

Bucky propels himself to his feet, and stalks quickly outside.

He’s not even upset, not entirely.

He’s just – suddenly, unequivocally, irrecoverably, _not_ Bucky Barnes right now. Not the right Bucky, at least. He doesn’t feel like Steve’s childhood friend right now, and the idea of pretending to is unbearable. He can’t pretend, because if he ever starts pretending, he thinks he’ll probably never stop.

Pretending would be too easy. Pretending, painting a person over the cracked shell he’s encased in…

No, he can’t. Steve deserves better than that.

Fuck, Bucky Barnes deserves better. Whenever the fuck he feels like showing up to the party.

Bucky walks away, and he senses Steve moving to follow – doesn’t need to turn to check, because there’s audible confirmation when Clint drawls loudly: “Let him go, Steve. He’ll come back when he’s ready.”

*

Bucky wonders, with no small measure of cruelty under his tongue as he stands on the porch and drinks in the meagre sunlight, how Steve feels about not being the expert on Bucky Barnes’ wellbeing anymore.

*

Steve looks at him, sometimes, when he thinks Bucky can’t tell.

It’s a soft, soulful look. Yearning, in varied shades of anger. He feels cheated.

Bucky understands. Steve feels cheated by all that time spent without him, all that grief that weighed him down, that waste and that pain that’s toughened him up and changed him. Changed him and changed Bucky, too.

Except, despite the holes in Bucky’s memory, there’s one thing he knows for sure. Knows it truly, the rattling of his eardrums as the crowd around him roars, cheering a cheap suit and a helmet that wouldn’t stop a pencil if it was thrown hard enough.

 _Let’s hear it for Captain America,_ he said, before anybody else could get there first; wouldn’t have been able to stand it if someone else got there first, then, and now, looking back he remembers why that was.

Bucky lost his Steve Rogers long before Steve lost his Bucky Barnes.

*

Bucky thinks Steve has forgotten that part.

*

After the world has ended and been restored, at the house by the sea as the day vanishes to dusk.

The tears don’t last long.

It’s been so long – longer even than their hearts can fathom, five years, five fucking years the world has turned in the space of their single stopped heartbeat – and they have better things to do than cry.

As soon as Bucky loosens his grip, Laura drops her own hold and lands daintily in the puddle of her spilled lager.

She pats his cheek once and makes an about turn.

“Beer?” she offers over her shoulder and Bucky accepts, because it might be as good for getting him drunk as fizzy water, but it sure as hell tastes better than the piss Bucky drank when he had his first sip all those decades ago.

She brings out two bottles, handing them both to him to crack open with his teeth, because while it had been satisfying to use his metal thumb for inane things like opening beer bottles when it felt like a petty fuck-you-HYDRA, he feels a bit more respectful of the hand Shuri has built for him.

Besides, he enjoys the face Laura pulls, the same as the one she gave Clint, like he’d hurt her molars in the process of abusing his own.

Soon enough, they’re right back where she started, sitting on the wide wooden railing of the veranda, watching the last of the sun plunge out of sight into the Pacific.

Bucky takes a sip of beer, hooking his ankles around the slats for additional balance that he doesn’t need.

“Pepper tell you how to find us?” Laura asks, which answers Bucky’s unconsidered question about Pepper’s untarnished integrity. He should probably make an effort to feel bad for doubting her.

“Who else?” Bucky grunts a little begrudgingly. He’s fed up of feeling bad about things.

“Well, Nat for one,” Laura points out in her familiar, practical honesty. She doesn’t see Bucky’s grimace, and continues, “Or that firecracker Princess who was kind enough to keep my daughter informed of your wellbeing.”

She doesn’t need to add the _unlike you._ There’s more aggression in her words than her tone. She’s utterly livid, but it’s a cloudy, passive breed of anger. The unsolicited sympathy doesn’t leave her eyes when they search Bucky’s face.

“Laura –”

“I know, Bucky,” she interrupts, and hearing his name like that in her mouth is about as weird as saying hers feels. It jars him, that softly cornered _K,_ miles away from her usual snipe of _Barnes._ He’s saved from responding by her short, angular laugh. “Jesus, Barnes. Drink your beer. I’ll warn you if I’m suddenly overcome with the need to yell at you.”

“’Preciate it,” he says with far too much sincerity, with far too much the tone of someone who has been forced to admit, shame-faced, scarlet-cheeked, rough-edged: _I don’t think I can take being shouted at right now, please._ And in Bucky’s haste to breeze over the vulnerable wobble in his throat he blurts out, tactlessly, “Who told you?”

 _Who?_ Because it sure as hell wasn’t Bucky Barnes. He had landed in Wakanda so frazzled and frantic that there wasn’t room for empathy, not for a single soul and then, and then, and then –

 _Nat._ That’s what he’s expecting to Laura to say, even if he doesn’t realise it. Maybe, just maybe, _Pepper,_ since they’re apparently so close these days.

But instead:

“Tony Stark.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise. No Stark could ever be accused of doing things by halves after all. All the same, Bucky’s undeserved surprise must show in his face, because Laura lets out another wolfish bark.

“He came to ask for my forgiveness. And Lila’s. I guess we were easier to reach than you, or Natasha.”

 _But he did, he did reach me,_ Bucky wants to confess, only he can’t because the words won’t stumble past the barrier of his clenched teeth.

Bucky flinches despite himself when Laura moves her hand. All she does is press her fingers lightly on the thick leather strap wrapped around Bucky’s upper forearm. She traces the symbols delicately, as she must have done a hundred times before. He should have asked the leather maker in Wakanda to make one for her, too.

She maybe needs it more than Steve does, these days. She deserves some luck.

“Where’s Lila?” he asks, and he wishes he could rid his voice of the yearning burning crackle, but he can’t.

“She’s with some friends. She’s very popular, despite being an asshole.”

“Her father’s daughter?”

“Through and through,” Laura retorts with a smirk, and she doesn’t need to voice how glad she is of that, because Bucky feels it, too.

They clink their bottles in mutual support, and drink a silent toast to the absent.

It feels – settling. Anchoring. She’s always put him at ease, this brutal darling. Never cared for excuses, or platitudes, or pity. Hadn’t flinched at the sight of him, even from the first glimpse, when he was less than half a person, just a name and a face and a gap where the programming had burned holes through his very core.

Bucky thinks perhaps, for all the lightyears of unhappiness he has known, the worn road of suffering he trekked unknowingly, in this, he has never been luckier.

“Well, nothing for it, I guess. You gonna marry me or what, Shipley?” he asks for the umpteenth time, and for the umpteenth time Laura rolls her eyes.

“Not on your life, Barnes,” she retorts.

Bucky, feather light, basking in the dusky glow, alive with it, freed by it, raises the vibranium fingers of his left hand and waggles them.

“What, the metal doesn’t do it for you?”

Laura lets out a real laugh, slurping beer out of her bottle and wiping her mouth, a teasing grimace painted over her delight.

“Not my kink, Sergeant,” she says, kicking his ankle, and he pretends to be offended, because it’s easy with her, easy in ways it was never easy back then, back _when,_ being friends with a woman without worrying about breaking her heart.

In 1938, Bucky went on seven dates with a girl called Elizabeth Harper, and he liked her company so much, liked her more than most people outside of Becca and Steve, and he often thought in the years that followed about how maybe he should have just shoved his feelings aside and married her the way everyone thought he would, but he _couldn’t._ Couldn’t do that to her.

He couldn’t look int her big brown eyes, shiny pleased and lovestruck, and feel anything other than guilty for making her happy with his lies.

Befriending Laura Shipley, though. It feels an awful lot like making up for a hell of a lot of lost opportunity. And the truth is, if he knows one thing about his old self, it’s this: if this was 1938, and Bucky was still the Bucky he was born into being, and this was the only life he had to live – well, he’d probably never do better than marrying this woman. They might have made each other closer to happy than unhappy.

As it is, though, he doesn’t have to marry her. He doesn’t have to pretend.

Laura shoves his shoulder and he shoves her back and they drink their beer and the sun sets and for one long, luxurious moment it’s as if they are back at the farmhouse. As if Clint and Lila are just across the fields bickering about whether or not she’s ready to learn archery with a full recurve bow.

As if Clint isn’t gone; as if he never had the audacity to die on them.

*

(There was a handler, once. One of the mechanics. He hummed under his breath as he worked and some of the other technicians called him Ludwig in a light way that lacked sincerity. The mechanic would tap his fingers on things, sometimes, like he was playing piano scales, leaving grease marks on the tables and his pant legs. He had the best kept record for fixing plating issues on the Winter Soldier’s left arm. _Alright, you’re all set, Florestan,_ he used to say, as he locked the Soldier’s arm into place, and the Soldier would comply.)

*

“So, is there a grave or something?” Tony Stark asks when he intrudes on Bucky’s solitude without introduction, in the voice of a man that doesn’t give a damn.

Bucky pities him.

He pities the man who won’t allow himself the luxury of grief, only the burden of knowing. Pities Tony the way, ever so rarely, he finds space to pity himself. A harsher indictment than either of them truly deserve.

Bucky says: “You’re better than that, Tony Stark.”

And Tony Stark, he flinches. Tony Stark scowls and Tony Stark demands, “What would you know about it, Petrushka?”

He possibly wants to make Bucky cry; or probably he thinks Bucky will try to break his face for the slight.

His dark brown eyes widen behind his sunny yellow glasses when Bucky, he just laughs. Bucky laughs, and it feels good to do so. Feels better to laugh and tip his head to the left in sideways acknowledgement, better than to tell Stark: _I had a handler who called me that, once._

Bucky is learning many things, these days. About himself, and about the world, but something he never needed to learn, was how much he dislikes intentional cruelty. That distaste has been in his bones his whole life, no matter how good he got at it.

Stark seems affronted at first, until a showman’s shyest grin breaks through.

Bucky gestures to the short dirt track that leads to the lake, ignoring Stark’s disconcerted expression, as if he’s surprised Bucky would accept his presence so casually. Bucky’s sure Stark isn’t this much of an idiot all the time.

“If you were gonna kill me, T’Challa wouldn’t have let you through the border,” Bucky points out in a lazy drawl. “And if he thought I would kill you he wouldn’t have let you come here at all.”

Unsurprisingly, Stark gets bristly as a porcupine at the insinuation his actions are only the result of being _allowed_ to do anything by anybody, even if that person is the King of Wakanda. Bucky refrains from adding that if he really thought Bucky meant him harm, he wouldn’t have stepped so easily out of his Iron Man suit.

Stark points out he’s known where Bucky’s been long enough to make all sorts of nefarious plans, and Bucky ignores him much the same way he used to ignore Howard’s blustering when he felt he wasn’t being given proper awe and admiration.

They walk side by side, and Stark makes an effort to end up on Bucky’s left side, but that is a no go. Bucky might trust T’Challa to keep him safe from crazy revenge killings on his land, but that’s a far cry from letting Tony Stark stand on his more vulnerable half.

It’s late morning. The skies are clear and the lake is still. The air is alive with the chittering noise of insects and in the distance, Bucky can hear what sounds like W’Kabi having an argument with his damn rhino again. Bucky’s given up offering to help out, because W’Kabi had looked about ready to take his other arm when the rhino actually settled under Bucky’s hand, last time.

In Bucky’s defence, most animals quiet in his presence. Animals are attuned to predators. They recognise the Winter Soldier for what he is in all the most basic ways that humans have forgotten to sense.

 _You’re the White Wolf now,_ Shuri had quipped gleefully in front of far too many other people, and to Bucky’s dismay the moniker appears to have stuck. He can only hope Stark doesn’t get a load of that one.

They’re quiet, all the way to the water’s edge. The rustling of the grass is a comforting enough melody but it does little to settle Bucky’s nerves. Stark hasn’t turned up in Wakanda without warning, no doubt in total secrecy, over a year after storming away with as thorough an air of disdainful melodrama as he can possibly muster, just to ask a pointedly rude question to Bucky’s face.

Predictably, Bucky’s patience wins out over Stark’s.

Stark makes a quarter turn on his heels, so that he’s facing Bucky head on. Bucky, feeling only slightly dickish about it, doesn’t look back at him.

“It was a real question.”

In the split-hair second following his statement, Bucky thinks he’s talking about Siberia. His breath cuts the back of his throat and he nearly chokes. Then he realises Stark’s talking about Clint’s grave.

Bucky sets his jaw firm, and doesn’t rub his face tiredly the way he wants to, because he doesn’t want to give Stark the satisfaction of his exhaustion.

“It wasn’t Steve’s fault,” Bucky spits, because he should have said it at the time. Back in that hospital room, when Steve was in a goddamn _hospital bed_ against his super soldier nature, and Tony Stark felt fit to _shout at him_ about it.

Stark’s pale under his stupid beard and his stupider glasses.

“It wasn’t yours either,” Bucky continues, because he should have said that at the time, too. Back in that hospital room, when Stark was crying against all odds, and Steve Rogers felt fit to shout at him, too.

He does look at Stark properly, then. Not a glancing onceover, or a hard glare. He looks at him, at Tony Stark.

There’s not a fantastic amount of Howard in his features, and Bucky doesn’t remember exactly what Maria Stark looked like, but he thinks Tony is his mother’s son just as much as he is his father’s. Bucky looks at Tony, sees the little boy he was and the grown man he is, and not for the first time he _gets_ it. He gets why Steve was so devastated to lose this guy’s friendship.

He’s a reckoning of a man, in more ways than his weapons.

Stark – _Tony_ – looks surprised, to say the least.

“It was your fault they got locked up on that Raft, whatever your intentions were,” Bucky says, and he doesn’t try to soften it, but he does keep any ire carefully layered beneath a cool veneer of fact. Tony recoils anyway. “But everything that came after. There’s a lot of blame to go around. It’s wrong to lay it all at Steve’s feet, and it’s greedy to try keep it all for yourself.”

Tony’s mouth does this – _thing._ It moves like a word, a grimacing face of pain and reprieve. Like Bucky’s just offered food to a starving man, only to choke him with it.

“Haven’t you heard?” Tony asks with the worst façade of cheerful aggression Bucky’s seen since before Stevie Rogers got his Captaincy. “Greed is in the Stark blood.”

“Oh, I know,” Bucky says, nodding, and he holds back from saying _Your Pa was the worst of it,_ because that will get them nowhere. Instead he looks him in the eye and says, calmly: “I’m sorry for what HYDRA made me do. But they did make me. If you’re looking for absolution, or anything more, I’ve got nothing for you, Tony.”

Tony does flinch, then. Full bodied, face and hands and feet, all of him. He takes a step back, a step towards the water and the wind.

“I dug out some old HYDRA designs on the arm. I came to give them to the Princess, figured she could use them to help build you a new one.”

And Bucky, he’s _surprised,_ can’t help it. He’s surprised for a whole bunch of reasons. Surprised Tony would do it. Surprised Tony would admit to doing it. Surprised Tony would tell Bucky about it in person.

What he’s not surprised at, however, is the way Tony calls it _the arm._ It probably helps, not calling it _your arm,_ given he’s the one that blasted it off in the first place. He imagines calling the man out on it, but he can’t bring himself to. Any comparisons between Tony Stark and the HYDRA Techs who, in Bucky’s most ignored memories would talk over his prone body with impartial _it_ and _the_ on their tongues, is a step over a line he’s much too tired to cross.

Bucky shuffles one foot, flicking his ankle expertly to kick at a flat pebble into his hand before throwing it, so that it skims the water twelve times.

“You did not just do that,” Tony says, and looks like he regrets it. Bucky laughs again, firmer this time.

“Clint taught me,” he admits, and he’s not sure he meant to say it but – well. There are worse secrets to spill. Instead he adds, “So you aren’t going to build me a new arm yourself?”

Instead of wincing, or raising his hackles the way Bucky expects him to, Tony actually laughs. He reaches down to pick up a flat pebble of his own. He throws it, and it skims twice before sinking.

“I don’t feel _that_ bad,” he says archly. “You are very capable of killing me out of the suit, and possibly capable while I’m in it.”

Bucky’s not expecting himself to flinch. He nods sharply in agreement. He had felt the cracking around the arc reactor in the Iron Man suit under his fist, and he couldn’t say for sure if he would have stopped himself before doing fatal damage, and the slip of his control frightens him.

What frightens him more than that, maybe, is the uncertainty of whether or not Steve would’ve stopped him, either.

Bucky thinks that’s probably one of things causing those bags under Tony’s eyes that the glasses don’t hide, no matter how much Tony probably thinks they do.

Bucky points to the southeast, in the direction of the mountains.

“We scattered his ashes over there. T’Challa can show you if you want.”

The lump in his throat is sudden, and more painful than the phantom electrics of his missing arm. Tony’s gaze follows the line of his pointing finger.

“Not going to give me the grand tour –”

“Don’t push it,” Bucky says, swollen up with the need for him to shut the fuck up, and miracle of miracles, he does.

Tony just nods, his hands sliding back into the pockets of his slacks.

Bucky feels his eyes burning. He looks out across the Wakandan plains, so bright and vibrant sometimes he’s sick with it. Homesick for the grey polluted brick blur of New York City, 1937. When the world was holding its breath, forestalling a war that would cleave it apart, and Bucky was nobody, nobody but that Rogers kid’s best friend, and George Barnes’ punch drunk son, and pretty little Becca Barnes’ protective big brother.

He hears the movement, and that’s the only reason he doesn’t react when Tony’s hand is suddenly resting on his right shoulder. If he’s worried about Bucky lashing out, he doesn’t show it.

They stand perfectly still, for almost a minute. Neither of them finds the words. At least, Bucky doesn’t, and if Tony does, he doesn’t feel like sharing them. He lets go of Bucky’s shoulder and walks back up the track alone. Bucky doesn’t turn around, not even when he hears the whirring of the Iron Man suit, the sparking blast of it taking off into the air.

He looks at the undisturbed water, reflecting the reeds across at the other stretch of bank. A small cat, one of the strays that’s been lurking around, making a nuisance of itself but also helpfully chomping down on rodents, appears from between the long grasses. She’s got a snippy little whiskered face, and she eyes Bucky with judgement as she laps up some water.

“What did you _want_ me to say to him?” Bucky snarls at her, because that’s marginally less foolish than asking the empty air.

The cat just drinks her fill, and retreats into the grasses.

Bucky snorts, and rubs his face tiredly.

He thinks he used to be able to hold onto anger. Used to thrive on it, maybe.

He doesn’t bother wondering if he’ll ever see Tony Stark again, because the odds are the universe enjoys fucking him over too much to deny itself the pleasure.

*

He’s sort of right, but, the thing is – he’s also sort of wrong.

*

When they lose the fight, the first time around, Bucky feels something in his every particle, the kind of numb tingling he still gets in his left shoulder socket when his body forgets he’s not all skin and bone anymore. It spreads like fire through a barrier of glass, never quite reaching, until all of him – he doesn’t hurt, but he feels it.

He looks at Steve’s face, Steve’s pasty, horrified face, the exact same expression as he wore in 1945 while he clung to that train and yelled to _hold on –_ Bucky stares at him and he says, hoarse, and frightened in a way he thought he didn’t know how to be anymore:

“Steve?”

Steve vanishes – or, actually, _Bucky_ vanishes.

*

It’s hardly the first time.

*

It starts with a stop. A stopping.

He’s not theirs anymore.

He’s not _theirs._ He’s not anybody’s.

He belongs – belonged. He used to belong. Or, he was a belonging.

_(Your name is James Buchanan Barnes – Your name is James Buchanan – Your name is James – Your name is – Your name – Your – Bucky? – Your name is James –)_

He’s had names before. All kinds of names. He has answered to them obediently. He has kept them folded up inside the tiny pocket of his head where knowledge is crammed between the white noise crackling of electricity. Soldier and Weapon and Fucking Come Here and Bloodhound and Parsley and Asset.

He is used to having _names._

What comes less naturally –

_You’re my friend._

He is not used to _being._ There is a line between belonging and existing and he stumbles across it so quickly he doesn’t even realise he’s doing so until he’s standing on the lapping shore of the Potomac River and thinking _What do I do now?_

At his feet, Captain America lies bloody and breathing. It’s enough. He walks away, before he can be found. He vanishes. Vanishes into the lines of the trees, concealed by foliage and force of will and he listens, listens to the thumping of a heart inside a chest. His heart, inside his chest. He watches carefully through the leaves as a man runs down the beachy line of the river’s edge.

The man is armed. The man is fast.

The man is holding a recurve bow and the man is talking – wearing an earpiece, the man’s got an earpiece in. The man is saying _You had more than enough time while you were cosied up in_ and the man staggers to a brief half and the man says _I’ve got eyes on Cap_ and then the man stops talking, runs the rest of the way to Captain America’s prone body.

The man starts heaving the Captain further up, so his legs are out of the water.

The man’s saying _Steve? Steve, fuck, open your, Steve, Jesus, Rogers, Steve!_

The man looks up, directly through the foliage, and for the tiniest, briefest, most miniscule of moments, the man’s eyes widen, like they’ve seen something unexpected.

He stares back at the man, and ignores the gun strapped to his ankle. He turns away and leaves, before he can be seen. He leaves, that heart in that chest, pounding like fists on the bars of a cage begging to be let out. Did he do that, once? His hands remember the feeling even if his mind conjures no image to accompany it.

He vanishes.

He’s not theirs anymore.

He is unbelonging himself.

*

There is a process to unbelonging.

The dust of his shredded subconscious settles like moonbeams in his head, illegible and erratic. The disjointed fractures of what might be memories splinter their way together in stops and starts.

He retreats.

Retreats all the way to an abandoned apartment in a half torn down building. Scares the shit out of two squatters in the apartment above, but he doesn’t kill them, which might be progress or it might be relapse. He sleeps and wakes in cycles, he sweats out his dreams that might just be memories, until, until –

He wakes up on the fourth day of the second week, and he doesn’t panic.

He’s lying on his back. There’s a thin pillow under his head, a lumpy mattress under his body. Scraped red drapes over a dirty window that rattles with the force of the wind and a door that sticks when it locks. There’s a light hanging from the watermarked ceiling and he stares at a tiny spider clinging to the bulb, slowly inching towards the cord.

Bleak cold sunshine sneaks around the drapes, the traffic is loud from the street below.

He lies on his back, awake. Aware.

Stares at a spider on a lightbulb and sees in his mind’s eye, a tall man wearing blue, and white, and red. There’s blood in his eyes and on his hands and he says: “You’re my friend.”

Is that who he is? Is that how he’ll find out?

There is no keystone of a person inside him anymore.

He builds one, all over again.

*

He is born James, for his father’s father, as if to share a likeness beyond the blood in his veins.

James Buchanan, because his parents were drunk when they named him, or so his CO will surmise, twenty-five years later.

As a kid he looks in the mirror and he sees James, the son of his father. Meanness in his hands and in his face when he’s in a temper. He unlearns how to be his father’s son from his mother, who loves even those that don’t earn it for themselves. She calls him James, says it like it isn’t the cut-out of a handprint on her face.

When Rebecca is born, when she grows up, she calls him _JB,_ but he’s somebody else by then.

Bucky, they call him, the other kids, and the adults.

Bucky.

Chooses it for himself, not just once, but twice.

 _(Who the hell is Bucky?_ He asked and even then, the rasp of New York’s vowels tasted stale in his obedient mouth.)

*

“You can call me JB, if you want,” he tells a different kid, later on.

She scrunches up her nose the same way her father does, and tries it on for size. _JB._

“OK then,” she says with a shrug. “JB. You can call me Lila, I suppose.”

*

On the fourth day of the second week, once he has woken up and become accustomed to the alien sensation of not panicking, he strips off all his clothes, steps into the shower cubicle in the bathroom and turns on the water.

The pressure is poor, and it takes a while for him to be completely soaked through. His hair slowly plasters over his neck and jaw and he leans his forehead into the tiles, inhaling the droplets. The taste of the pipes, chemical metal, sitting heavy on his tongue.

It’s almost cold, trickling down his back. When he turns to the side, his hand catches on the tap, swinging it, and after a few spluttering coughs the water churning out of the showerhead starts to heat up. He turns his face into the spray, his eyes closed, not so much surprised as reminded.

Warm. Yes. Better.

He remembers, not so much the moment as the feeling, of a bowl of hot water being tipped from above his head into his hairline, followed by a hand with nails just long enough to scratch pleasantly at his scalp. Scratching out – soap.

He looks around, vision blurred by the water stinging in his eyes, fuzzy white porcelain jigsawed by grimy cracks, but there’s no soap.

He frowns, tries to remember where to get it from.

A store.

Is there one nearby?

Doesn’t matter. He’s still not got money to buy it with.

Steal?

There’s a familiar sensation in his right hand to imagine it, sneaking something into a pocket. Eyes closed, candy, cans, a packet of pencils. He was good at it maybe. Less conspicuous, when both his arms were cut from the same cloth.

His left arm is a piece apart from him, and a part of him. An instinctive weapon seared into his skin, stiffening in the cold, burning him in the heat. It’s in his spine, the wiring, nuts and bolts. The weight of the metal arm is an off-balance centre that he counters every second of every day. Works at it like his lungs work to breathe. It’s part of him, has been part of him longer than his real left arm ever was, if he ever had one.

Perhaps that was a dream, too.

The water starts to cool, sluicing in thin rivers over his shoulders until he’s shivering. Until he nudges the tap with his knuckles, drips dry with his forehead pressed against the tiles, shuddering off the droplets, toes clenched and fingers loose.

He remembers this. Remembers standing in the cold, in the dark, soaked to his bones, waiting.

For what?

Orders.

The next mission.

By the time he opens his eyes, he’s dry, and the sun has stopped shining through the gaps in the curtains. He climbs out of the shower, cold feet on cold tiles. Shivers.

*

On the fifth day of the second week, he wakes up.

He doesn’t panic.

His name is James Buchanan Barnes. He’s not theirs anymore. He is unbelonging himself.

*

Bucky’s a kid when he first meets a stupid punk called Steve Rogers.

Steve, that bony devil who spits fire and brimstone when he speaks. Who tells Bucky he don’t need defending but Bucky knows better. He looks at the blood trickling out of Steve Rogers’ nose and sees the shake of his knuckles and hears the rasp of bubbling oxygen in his lungs and thinks maybe he’s never seen anybody so brave before, so full of blinding, hostile goodness.

He’s a man when he meets a stupider punk of a costume called Captain America.

He likes Steve a whole lot better.

 _End of the line,_ Bucky promises, anyway because take off the stars and stripes and what’s Steve got left but the same hostile goodness that was always there, his whole live long life?

 _End of the line,_ Bucky promises.

Again and again and again, until he falls right off the track.

*

Bucky’s lying on a table, the first time he meets Captain America.

Needles tucked under his skin, filling up his veins with something that won’t ever get flushed out.

They broke his toes, and his heels. He felt the bones cracking but then Captain America asks him to stand and he does, without flinching. Bucky Barnes looks up into the face of Steve Rogers towering over him, brute strength unbeknownst to man yet still those gentle eyes. Steve tells him to get up, and so he does.

 _Where did you go?_ he wants to ask but instead, instinctive tongue bleeding his words: “Did it hurt?” because all he can think is in measures of hurting nowadays, that’s what war is, to measure in increments of hurting.

“A little,” Steve replies and that’s how Bucky knows, knows in his broken foot bones, what he means is: _It hurt like hell._

He meets Captain America, who wears his best friend’s face, who is all the best parts of Steven Grant Rogers, which just so happen to be all the worst parts of him too, in Bucky’s less than humble, experience-borne opinion.

A million voices cheer for the hero in the cowl and the suit, everything but the cape itself, and Bucky wonders how it doesn’t burn Steve’s skin right off his back, to see the proof of their fickle loyalty. All those people that would’ve looked past skinny Steve Rogers’ pasty face before a bunch of scientists changed the outside, matching an inside Bucky always knew, and loved.

He’s lying on a table when he meets Captain America, wondering _Who the hell._

And he’s lying on a table the first time they hook him up to their electrodes and their body plates, and they scrape Steve Rogers out of his head, like a scalpel scoring out his name from Bucky’s bones.

*

“Hey, you,” Clint says, disrespectful and adoring and when Bucky looks up, it’s into that face of split sunshine.

Grey grinning eyes.

Here he stands, close as rain to thunder, looking down at Bucky Barnes like he knows something important, something worth saying. Bucky smiles back, props himself up on his elbows and tips one ear to his shoulder and listens to the quiet rhythm of their breaths.

Clint kneels up onto the mattress, patient as a resting hawk, smelling of grass and coffee and the corn crushed outside underfoot. The hand he reaches out is pink, rough, fingers splayed warm over Bucky’s stomach. When his muscles contract under his fingertips Clint’s laugh chuffs out of him.

“Go to sleep, spaceman,” Clint says, admonishment for the ages, as if he couldn’t see the battering of sunlight through the huge north facing windows.

Dropping back into the pillow, Bucky sea-stars outwards, taking up the whole bed with a lackadaisical smirk.

“’M’not tired,” he lies through his teeth, eats up that sunshine smile, puts both his hands over Clint’s to hold his pinky and his thumb, pretending not to see the miracle of his trust. Clint sighs, leans down low enough to kiss his knuckles, dry and warm.

Whispers against his skin: “You haven’t slept in four days. You are tired.”

Grey glitter grin, not judging, not angry, not even amused. Bucky closes his eyes, and at the press of kisses against his eyelids, he sinks a little closer, towards something that might be sleep.

*

When Bucky first gets to the farmhouse, he isn’t exactly Bucky yet. He’s just – a _person._ A person who used to be Asset, who used to be Sergeant, who used to be Bucky. He’s not sure who he is, only that he is no longer the Soldier. A Koschei unmade and reborn, collecting the pieces of himself back together, cutting his hands on their edges.

It goes like this. Not-Soldier gets to the farmhouse on a Thursday, but he doesn’t approach until the following Sunday.

Later on, he’ll be forced to acknowledge that the only reason he found the farmhouse at all is because Clint Barton let him, and the only reason he didn’t even _notice_ Clint was letting him is because he had been alone for over two months and self-maintenance is hard when a person isn’t even completely sure they’re a person yet.

Regardless, he finds the farmhouse on a Thursday. He tears out a bunch of cameras in the land’s perimeter and has three naps in trees and kills a fox that was getting too close to the chicken coop and then realises he probably could have just chased the fox away but decides that on his kill list, the fox is probably quite low down, so whatever he’s feeling it isn’t very practical.

He identifies the feeling as guilt, and decides he doesn’t like it.

On the following Sunday, once the house lights have all been turned off and the stars are mostly veiled by the storm that’s still ten hours away, he sneaks into the farmhouse. He walks silently through the dark kitchen, the open plan dining area and living room that’s haphazardly scattered with weapons and cushions and dogeared books and unwashed cups.

He makes his way up the stairs and he is confronted by a man standing on the landing, wearing a threadbare pair of sweatpants, a loose tank shirt, carrying a bow and arrow that he isn’t even pointing at anything.

It’s too easy, wrangling the man up against the door behind him, tearing the weapon from his grasp. Disturbingly easy.

The man is _smiling._

“Hello, Bucky Barnes,” the man says, looking absolutely unperturbed by the knife tip that not-Soldier has hooked under the bone of his jaw. A drop of blood runs down his throat, catching at the corner of his clavicle.

“Not my name,” not-Soldier replies through gritted teeth.

The man – Hawkeye, Clint Barton, ex-SHIELD Agent, Avenger, Steve Rogers’ friend – shrugs. He’s leaning the rest of his weight properly into his bedroom door, as if hunkering down for the long haul.

“Whatever you say, Twinkletoes,” Hawkeye says casually. Then he blinks, as another drop of blood drips down his neck.

It’s not a name he’s been called before, but it quickly goes into the discard pile.

Clint never really stops using it, despite Bucky’s later protests.

*

 _(Bullseye,_ Monty Falsworth used to call him, and for a while it just meant _Good At His Fucking Job,_ until one of the others jokingly pointed out that it was also the name of a fictional goddamn mutt sidekick of a murderer, and then the name felt a bit more vicious, and maybe Bucky was paranoid but also maybe Monty was clairvoyant or something, because that’s pretty much exactly how things turned out.)

*

Not-Soldier goes inside the house on a Sunday, and a dribble of blood drips down Hawkeye’s neck, and Hawkeye folds his arms across his chest looking _affronted_ as he says: “Look, Twinkletoes, I appreciate you’re just being very cautious and all, but I’m barefoot and unarmed, so – oh. Sorry. I wasn’t making a pun.”

Then his face splits in a real grin, a bright thing, shiny as magpie treasure, and not-Soldier withdraws his knife.

“I’ve read your file,” he says with a huff of irritation, sheathing the knife anyway. “You are dangerous, barefoot and unarmed.”

“Against your average Russian Mafia thug, maybe,” Hawkeye shrugs with one shoulder. “I’m a little outmatched by the Fist of HYDRA.”

“I’m not –” not-Soldier starts and stops, the bang of a bullet. Can’t yank it back, can only stifle himself by crushing the insides of his mouth between his teeth. He doesn’t like Hawkeye’s raised eyebrows, the glimmer of amusement vanishing into the depths of his eyes, to be replaced by an unnerving sincerity.

“Well,” Hawkeye says, a little less brashly. His eyes are the colour of steel in sunlight. His nose has been broken more than once. He’s wearing hearing silver and violet aids. “I’m glad we’ve got that much sorted, Bucky Barnes.”

This time, he doesn’t correct the man. He tests it for the thousandth time in the boundaries of his reality.

 _Bucky Barnes._ A name carved into the history annals, the name of a man who lived, and was lost.

Hawkeye reaches up slowly, projecting his movements, to wipe the blood from his neck.

“I can offer you coffee, a shower, and a bed, in any order you like,” he says. And, receiving only a blank look in response, he continues: “I think that order will do just fine. Let’s go the kitchen. I assume you know your way, Barnes? You’ve been surveilling me long enough.”

There’s a snort of laughter that it takes not-Soldier, takes _Bucky Barnes,_ a moment to realise came from himself.

Hawkeye laughs, too.

It sounds real.

*

Sometime between the first execution and the first assassination, HYDRA toys with the idea of giving their primary asset a cyanide tooth. A fresh set of installed instructions for cracking it open in case of capture.

In 1991, a shade of Bucky Barnes claws too close to the surface of the Winter Soldier’s mask.

Between the fitful panic and rage and overwhelming clarity, he remembers the iron tang of metal in the back of his throat. Fingers in his mouth, a needle in his tongue, a blade in the roots of his teeth.

He breaks his jaw and four of his back teeth before they figure out what he’s trying to do.

It doesn’t work, though.

There’s no pill.

*

“What’s next for the unconquerable James Buchanan Barnes?” Laura Shipley asks between sips of beer, her face ablaze with the bronze of the sunset. Bucky shakes his head, because he’s been many things in his many lifetimes, but unconquerable was never one of them.

“Sleep,” he says with a reactive laugh. “A lot of sleep.”

“Didn’t you do enough of that in your icicle assassin days?”

 _“Je-sus,”_ Bucky barks, kicking Laura’s shin almost hard enough to bruise. “You’re worse than Wilson.”

“Is he the cute one with the wings?”

“Don’t even,” Bucky says to Laura’s sideways smirk.

“Oh, _come on,”_ Laura says in spectacular imitation of her daughter. “A lady’s gotta have something to keep her entertained, and apparently I’m not allowed to talk about how hot Captain Amer –”

“Laura Shipley, you’re the grossest human being on the planet. Get the fuck out of here, that man is a sexless Ken doll and I’ll hear nothing more about it.”

Laura’s eyes glitter gleefully and Bucky struggles to keep the hypocritical laughter out of his voice, because he committed enough years of his life trying to get Steve laid to know how completely inaccurate that statement is, but if he ever hears Laura – or, God fucking forbid, _Lila –_ describe Steve Beach-Boy Rogers in anything other than completely neutral terms, he’ll lose his goddamn mind, in the least ironic of ways.

“But seriously, Barnes,” Laura says, and she means it. The line of her arm pressed against Bucky’s is firm and inordinately comforting. “You better have a plan. Lay it on me.”

“Why do I need a plan?” Bucky asks, scraping his fingernails through his hair and frowning at the glimmer of sunlight on the Pacific. “When did Clint ever have a plan? He did fine without one. I’ve tried having plans, Shipley. They don’t work out, and you’re just left feeling disappointed. Making plans is like setting yourself up to fail.”

Laura doesn’t flinch from the uptick in Bucky’s voice as he defends himself, but the corners of her lips do tighten considerably, her throat working around several swallowed retorts as she stares with golden empathy at Bucky’s face, the stubble on his jaw and the creases of his eyes.

“Clint had plans, Barnes,” she says after a few moments of painfully shallow breaths. She turns on the porch railing a little, her knee bumping into his. Her fingernails are loud on the glass bottle in her hands. “He might never have thought himself worthy of one, but he had plans for everybody else. You, me, Lila. Kate. Nat. That stupid cute dog he gave to Kate. Hell, he had a twelve-step plan for how to get Steve Rogers married with two-point-five kids before the decade was out.”

It isn’t the comfort it maybe should be. Bucky laughs, a token stutter, if only because Laura probably isn’t exaggerating about the twelve-step Get Rogers Hitched plan. And he knows she’s right. He knows he’s going to need something to set his mind to, something more thrilling than _taking care of the goats_ and less terrifying than _surviving the apocalypse._

He doesn’t quite dare to wonder what Clint’s plan had been for him. He doesn’t want to know, because the odds are he’s already messed it up.

It wouldn’t have been in Clint’s plan for Bucky to lock himself back up in a cryotank in Wakanda, or to let Steve battle through his exile without sticking by his side. Clint would never have made a plan for Katie Bishop throwing herself off a cliff on the other side of the galaxy, or Natasha surrendering her soul to the devil himself, or for Laura to spend her evenings sitting on her porch drinking beer by herself as she watches the hours vanish out from under her –

A hand tucks itself against the column of his spine, and Bucky catches his breath with difficulty.

He looks at Laura, full of apologies to someone who can’t hear them.

“I don’t have a plan, Shipley,” he tells her.

She nods, and smiles, not unlike Wanda had done, at Stark’s funeral the day before.

“I’m not talking a step-by-step for the next fifteen years here, Sergeant,” she says with false sternness as she lavishly bats her eyelashes. “We can start small. Like, where are you going to live? And, are you finally going to learn how to braid your hair properly?”

Bucky rolls his eyes, and even lets her tug a lock of his hair in retaliation as he drinks his beer.

*

_Dear JB,_

_I miss you. ~~I miss~~_

_Mom told me we’re not allowed to know where you are. Sometimes it feels like you’re dead, too._

_My new school is way better but it’s loads bigger and I hate that. Mom keeps talking about college like it’s something I’m going to do. Some days I feel like I don’t want to do anything ever again, except come find you. Sometimes I think she doesn’t miss him at all._

_I tried to join an archery team that was advertising at school. She grounded me for a month._

_~~I wish~~ _ _~~I don’t~~ ~~I want~~ The new house is big and nice and I hate it. He used to leave me little notes to find, when he went away. Sometimes I wouldn’t find one for weeks. I’m never going to find a note in this place and sometimes I forget and then I remember._

_I heard you tell Mom once that you were afraid to remember. I didn’t understand at the time._

_I know it’s probably not the same, but I think I understand now. ~~Remb~~ Remembering feels like the worst thing in the world._

_I’m sending you one of his old notes with this stupid letter. I kept them all. I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not but I hope you’re not mad at me. I don’t have anybody to talk to. I know you miss him, even if she doesn’t._

_Please write back. Please._

_Love,_

_LILA_

_xxx_

*

Shuri leaves it in an unstamped envelope on the fence of the goat pen, one day.

Bucky doesn’t write back.

*

He feels shackled, and silenced, in ways he hasn’t felt since he shook off the muzzled existence of the Soldier.

*

_ROCKSTAR – I Love You. Make sure you eat all the vegetables on your pizza. YOUR FATHER X_

*

Steve wakes up, and _He loved you,_ and _I’m sorry,_ and _Bucky – Buck – Buck,_ hostile goodness in his bones.

It’s months and months before Steve is on a returning visit, between saving the world and chickening out of calling a broken-hearted friend to say he’s sorry. He’s sneaking extra treats to Shuri Junior and Goldilocks while he thinks Bucky’s not looking, and Steve says, “He had a daughter. Didn’t he?”

Bucky pauses, mouthful of admonishment about overfeeding his goats, and all the bluster drops out of him quicker than air from a popped balloon. The sun’s caught in Steve’s hair like the gold in Rumpelstiltskin’s spinning wheel, and his eyes are big and hopeful and ever so confused and Bucky wonders what the fuck led his thoughts there.

Doesn’t ask. Doesn’t want to.

“Lila,” Bucky replies, a rare crack in his clogged throat.

He watches Steve process that, and resolves not to apologise for keeping secrets.

Steve nods slowly, and brazenly feeds Goldilocks another treat, ruffling her bright head with his thumb.

“You knew her?” Steve asks.

The past tense hurts, but what else can he call it? The letter’s still sitting unanswered in a box under his bed, along with some broken hearing aids and a disused recurve bow.

Bucky nods.

“Yeah,” he says. “I knew her.”

*

In the quiet night, while they are not asleep, because a sleepless night is a dreamless night. Their skin sticky, their breaths shared, and Clint’s grey grinning eyes, starlit like the cloudless sky outside. He’s happy, in a solemn, lovely way. So is Bucky.

“I never thought I’d be good at being a dad,” Clint admits, extracts it from his heart like a tooth from his gums. His hands are firm but not heavy on Bucky’s waist, a reminder without becoming a cage. “But SHIELD offered me a job, and Laura was pregnant, and I knew she wanted to keep the baby even if we weren’t staying together. It was a whole mess, but – it worked out.”

“How old is she?” Bucky asks, because he knows her name and he knows her parents and he knows Clint loves her more than he could possibly explain. He needs the basics.

Clint lets out a little helpless shrug.

“Oh, you know. The age where she thinks she’s old enough to wear makeup but doesn’t yet know how to wash her dishes.”

“That’s not an age bracket, Barton,” Bucky snickers, tucking his ankle around Clint’s and shoving himself closer as the air cools the sweat from their bodies. “That’s how old _you_ are, still.”

Clint gives him a tiny headbutt of a retort, a laugh sticking staccato in the back of his throat as he carefully lets a bit more weight from his limbs drop around Bucky, pretending not to watch out for a bad reaction while Bucky pretends it’s not a necessary precaution. They know each other. Better than they did yesterday, not as well as they’ll know each other tomorrow.

It’s a process. Bucky, he’s unbelonged himself, and now, now he’s finding bits and pieces of himself he doesn’t mind gifting back, fragment by fragment, for Clint Barton to keep safe for him. And Clint, he’s giving shards of himself to Bucky in return.

It’s slow, and cautious, and wonderful.

“She wants to meet you,” Clint says, and maybe Bucky should have guessed that’s where it was going, but _hell_ if he isn’t blindsided all the same.

Just because Clint can turn his back on Bucky, can lie beside him in vulnerable unconsciousness and take out his hearing aids and hum tunelessly and forget Bucky is a less than a year out of a mask behind which he killed countless dozens and dozens of men and women. Just because Clint trusted Bucky to introduce him to Laura – and Laura, damn, _Shipley,_ a brutal darling with a wicked smile and eyes nearly as sharp as her ex-boyfriend’s.

Just because, just because. Doesn’t mean they’d trust him with their daughter.

Clint’s eyes, sea storms choppy with hope and horror, the kind of love Bucky forgot existed, or perhaps never knew.

“Do you want to?” Clint asks and Bucky can’t even bring himself to smile, it’s such a violent thing exploding in his chest.

“Yeah,” he says, breathless and cold. “Yeah, I do.”

Clint smiles, and kisses him, and Bucky smiles back with an open, kiss crushed mouth.

*

 _(Jerk,_ Steve called him. Always did, always would. A base lie, and an absolute truth, all rolled up into one neatly packaged word. Called him _Buck,_ too, more often than not, and maybe that was some kind of premonition of his own, maybe nominative determinism would always lead Bucky Barnes to frostbite and ghost stories, in the end.)

*

Bucky rolls his cumbersome limbs out of bed one day to follow the smell of bacon and tomatoes, tugging a hooded sweater on as he goes. He’s not sure at what point in the night Clint entirely gave up on trying to sleep next to him, but it was some time after the second violent wakening, and Bucky doesn’t really blame in.

The kitchen is suspiciously smoky, and Bucky eyes the alarm narrowly.

“Did you disable it?” he asks, and Clint makes an innocent humming sound as he swivels his hips to an imaginary beat and pushes the tomato halves around the searing pan on the stove.

Glitter grey grin over his shoulder, so goddamn pleased with himself. There are bags under his eyes and – yes, a large blueing handprint on his bicep that Bucky could slot his fingers perfectly over if he dared.

Clint turns away, so Bucky can’t see it anymore, which implies a rather rude assumption about Bucky’s understanding of object permanence, but Bucky allows it. The illusion of Clint’s complacency is the nicest possible balm to wipe away the night’s unpleasantness.

Bucky pulls some plates out of the cupboard and gets to work on the toast, falling into the natural rhythm of Clint’s bobbing hips without trying to figure out what song must be running through his head.

Once the table is set and waiting, Bucky sidles up to Clint’s right, sneaking his metal hand through the loop of Clint’s arm to grab a burst tomato half directly out of the pan and throw it straight into his mouth.

Clint takes hold of his hand, his palm naturally curving over the sharper metal edges of Bucky’s knuckles. He brings the cold folded fingers to his face and holds them there, a personal ice pack, quickly warming in the smoke from the pan. Bucky feels the edge of Clint’s smile widening.

“You know,” Clint says in a wry, teasing voice. “If you just add three more letters to your title, you go from _the_ _fist of HYDRA_ to _the fisting of HYDRA,_ which –”

“You’re the actual worst, Barton,” Bucky snaps with a startled sound that he flatly refuses to allow to become a laugh, snatching the clenched metal fist out of Clint’s grip so fast Clint accidentally punches himself in the mouth.

Clint laughs, anyway. Loud, and pleased, and purposeful. Bucky stalks to the table, takes a seat, and steels his expression into something grumpy while he proceeds to drink both his own coffee, and Clint’s, before Clint can notice. He watches the swivel of Clint’s hips, and ignores Clint’s metaphorical anatomical philosophy on how exactly one might go about fisting HYDRA.

“I mean, did we kind of do that when we hit that base in Minnesota? You literally punched a hole through that chair, so technically –”

“The _worst,_ Barton. Absolutely disgusting.”

Somehow, this makes Clint look more pleased with himself than anything else.

*

The base in Minnesota is the closest they come to getting caught.

It’s been a few months since Bucky arrived at Clint Barton’s farmhouse and it’s been a few weeks since Clint finally stopped calling him _Twinkletoes_ more often than not. It’s been a few days since Clint left Laura and Bucky in the house alone together for the first time, and it’s been a few hours since Lila waved them off with a grumpy bird finger that her mother threatened to cut off, only for Bucky to respond with the same and get an earful from Laura about it.

The base isn’t quite as abandoned as they’d thought it would be. They aren’t quite as disappointed about that as they probably should be.

Clint has been abstaining from his usual bow and arrow routine on these little excursions, which turns out to be a worthwhile sacrifice when an extra heat signature shows up on their scanners just as they finish cleaning up shop in the lab. For the most part, they’ve been tearing their way through bases, collecting and wiping data and maybe enjoying a little recreational destruction in the process.

Free Will Therapy, Clint called it the first time he watched Bucky systematically rip apart an entire underground training room in Utah.

In Minnesota, though, they get an unexpected visitor in the form of Sam Wilson, who has been bloodhounding after Bucky on the orders of one Steve End-Of-The-Line Rogers ever since DC. It’s not that Bucky doesn’t appreciate the loyalty, both Steve’s to Bucky’s and Sam’s to Steve’s. It’s just – damn annoying, is what it is. Can’t a man enjoy a bit of undisturbed recreational destruction?

“How do you want to handle this?” Clint asks as he checks his ammo and steps over the nearest body with a brief glance of interest at the place where the man’s face used to be. Bucky wipes the backs of his hands on his trousers, frowning at the blood caught in the metal plates of his left.

“Is it too soon to point out how lucky it is you haven’t left arrows all over the place for Falcon to find?” Bucky asks.

“Yes,” Clint replies, scowling with his head cocked like a puppy considering disobeying.

“I’ll let him catch a glimpse,” Bucky says, scraping his hair back and sliding a dark bandana over his nose and mouth, which is the closest thing they’ve found to covering his face that Bucky can withstand for more than five terrible seconds. “Odds are he’ll make chase, give you a chance to rig the place to blow. Rendezvous at the motel tomorrow morning. If I’m not there by seven thirty, go back home and I’ll make my way there once I’ve shaken him off.”

Clint narrows his eyes suspiciously.

Bucky tries his very best not to smile too broadly behind his bandana, because Clint will be able to tell, and then it’ll be game over.

“Ye of little faith,” Bucky says as he steps forwards, and in a moment of boldness, leans over to kiss Clint’s cheek through the fabric covering his mouth. When he draws back, Clint is still glowering, but he’s nodding, too. His eyes are a little wider than before, his pupils a little darker.

“I’ll wait until eight thirty,” is all he says, and Bucky rolls his eyes.

“Sure thing, Penelope.”

“Run fast, Twinkletoes.”

Bucky nods, running his hand over the knives he knows are concealed in the tac gear Clint had apparently been sneaking out of SHIELD supplies for his own personal storage like stationary supplies for _years._

He watches Clint for one indulgent moment, the backlight of his frowning profile as he takes in the upturned room, the flex of his hands, before he turns and leaves silently through the dark corridor that will take him west.

He runs, fast, and far.

The next morning, when he gets to the motel at quarter to nine in the morning, Clint is stretched out on the bed with a half empty pack of donuts, sugar on his smirking lips and his ankles crossed on the bedspread.

“You’re a fucking dumbass,” Bucky says, and Clint rolls his eyes, picking up another donut and holding it out to Bucky.

Bucky ignores the offer, sitting on the bed and watching as Clint pulls himself a bit more upright, grinning eyes of grey glitter in the half light. When he reaches out to take hold of the side of Clint’s face, Clint tips his cheek into the touch. When he leans in, very cautiously, Clint’s eyebrows twitch into a frown that’s something more like worrisome disbelief.

And when Bucky kisses the sugar right off his mouth, he feels Clint’s smile, pushing into the heat of it, welcoming the surprised gasp of air he lets out in response.

“You said you’d leave at eight thirty,” Bucky says, with his face still pressed up against Clint’s, nose to nose, their foreheads touching. Bucky licks his lips, tasting the sugar from the donuts, artificial and overly sweet and very warm.

Clint shrugs.

“I didn’t say which timezone, though, did I?”

Bucky laughs, despite himself, and wraps his hand a bit more solidly around the back of Clint’s neck.

*

Maybe Bucky should have expected it.

Maybe he did, and he just didn’t want to admit it to himself.

The thing is, Steve is livid, when he finds out. He’s so angry, angry the way he used to be when he didn’t have the power behind him punches to back up his smart goddamn mouth. Angry, at _Bucky,_ and worse, at _Clint._

“…he told me he was looking out for you! And I believed him! I trusted him, and here you’re telling me he’s taking advantage –”

“Oh hell Steve, what?” Bucky can’t help but laugh, his eyes burning almost as hot as his ears as he wheels around Steve’s mighty impression of a snorting bull. “Clint, taking advantage? He wouldn’t know _how.”_

Which is the truth, more than half of it. Clint looks at Bucky like he’s holding his breath; like he’s a kid praying by the side of his bed and Bucky’s entire being, his body and whatever scraps of his soul are left, have been scrounged up to rally around that expression, to rally _for_ it. If Bucky sleeps at all at night, it’s because Clint Barton helped him learn how.

Steve, tall Steve, righteous Steve, hostile and good and so full of care he’ll die of it, one day.

So many years between them, but Bucky loves him, always did, always would. _Patroclus is on the warpath,_ Dum Dum and Monty used to mutter, when they knew Bucky could hear them, and he’d shoulder his rifle and keep his head down as his bones hurt inside him in ways they hadn’t before Azzano, and Gabe, Gabriel Jones, the way he’d smile at Bucky in the dark, soft-like, easy, knowing and secretive and brave.

Maybe they were right, maybe they were wrong. Truth is, it doesn’t really matter now, does it?

 _It’s little more than Stockholm Syndrome, Bucky!_ Steve shouts, and Bucky shoves him so hard he topples backwards to the floor.

“Get the hell out of here, _Captain._ I mean it. Get out, Steve. I am not kidding right now.”

He gets the hell out, all the way to the jet, and Natasha follows him to have a nice chat and then Clint heads out to give him some coffee like a hissing cat grumpily dumping a dead mouse on a doorstep and then Bucky goes last, because Steve’s still fucking sulking outside, and when he loudly makes large claims about his virtue to coax an embarrassed Steve out of the jet Clint squawks obscenely and Natasha lets out a cackling laugh that makes her sound about fifteen years old.

“I’m not ready to forgive you yet, so you’re going to go inside, eat your lasagne and be _very fucking nice_ to Clint while I make up my mind about how mad I am,” Bucky tells Steve once he’s deigned to come back, which is base lie, because Bucky had forgiven him the second he left, like freaking always, but he’s better at pretending otherwise, now.

Clint’s teenage daughter is a goddamn master at the art of fake grudges. She’s teaching Bucky well.

Steve goes inside and eats his lasagne and is positively golden in his behaviour towards Clint, and Bucky does his best to pretend not to notice that Clint isn’t actually looking at anybody’s faces, just their hands and their plates, like he daren’t seek out more.

It’s that torn up feeling in Bucky’s chest, the one that happens on the rare occasion when it’s Clint waking Bucky up with his nightmares, and not the other way around. It sits uncomfortably inside him, and he supposes he should just be grateful that Clint doesn’t pull away when Bucky slides his hand over his leg under the table, low enough to be polite, high enough to earn himself a blush.

Later that night, when they’ve snuck out onto the roof and are sharing a cigarette and Bucky is ignoring the fact that he can hear Natasha listing lung cancer statistics from inside the house, Clint bumps his shoulder into Bucky’s and says: “You’ve not had sex with Steve’s teammate, huh? So, what exactly was it we were doing in the shower the morning before I left? Because it wasn’t playing pat-a-cake.”

“Pat-a-something,” Bucky mumbles through a drift of smoke, leaning back with both hands and stretching out his legs. “By traditional definition, we haven’t had _sex,_ Hawkeye. I was being truthful.”

“Oh yeah, we’re real traditionalists in this household,” Clint chuckles, taking a final drag and offering Bucky the last of it.

Bucky shakes his head, so Clint scrunches the butt into a roof tile and leaves it to one side before leaning back into the crook of Bucky’s arm. He’s an absolute mess, truth be told. Bucky had felt the bandages around his ribs earlier, and for all his spritely insults and anecdotes, he’s sounded nothing short of despairing every time he’s called for the past two weeks, ever since Sokovia, and Stark’s murderous robot.

“Damn straight,” Bucky murmurs in agreement, just to hear Clint crack a short laugh.

Bucky lets his head fall back a bit, eyeing the bright cave of stars above them. He reaches up to scruff at the back of Clint’s neck, fingers teasing his hairline soothingly. Clint shivers.

The truth is, by his rather obstinate and untrue definition, they haven’t had _sex,_ and Bucky isn’t sure if he wants to. Rather, he isn’t sure if he wants it enough to take the risk. Not when the risk involves quite possibly killing or doing Clint serious damage, when whatever way around they try it, he’s either going to enjoy it too much, or not enjoy it at _all._

“Thinking some real deep thoughts, are we, Twinkletoes?” Clint asks.

Bucky snorts, and pinches the back of his neck.

“Oh, real _deep._ You got no idea, pookie.”

“That’s even worse than schnookums.”

“You said schnookums made you feel like I was your grandmother.”

“Yeah, and now I just feel like your pet hamster,” Clint grumbles, turning a little into Bucky and hissing loudly as a bit more weight falls into his ribs. “Shit. Fuck. Ow.”

“Alright, that’s it. We’re going inside,” Bucky says, poking and prodding at Clint to get him moving. “We’re going to shower, rewrap your entire ribcage and then get some Advil in you before going to bed.”

“I only cracked a couple. They’re mostly healed.”

“Well, better safe than sorry, pookie. Let’s go.”

He paws at Clint’s head to get him moving, and not for the first time marvels at the way Clint pushes his head into the touch, even when it results in Bucky’s fingers brushing over the shell of his ear. It had taken a while to get there, but it’s been some time since Clint stopped flinching when Bucky got too close to his ears.

For a moment, they stop like that. The cool air slipping between them, Bucky’s right hand cradling the side of Clint’s head.

“Any case,” Clint mutters, his eyes closed, his eyelashes trembling. “M’not Steve’s teammate anymore. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

“You want to tell him tomorrow?”

Clint turns his face, kissing the palm of Bucky’s hand before blowing a raspberry into it with childish delight. Bucky taps him lightly in the face, as if rapping him with a newspaper.

“Maybe,” Clint says, sounding about as enthusiastic as he had done when he’d told Bucky about his decision.

Clint’s swung himself around, so his legs are dangling off the roof, just above the platform below. Bucky considers for a moment, before sliding down to sit behind him, his legs on either side of his hips and his arms loose around his waist. He pushes his nose into the back of Clint’s neck.

“You don’t have to, you know. It’s a big thing.”

Clint takes a very slow breath inside the cage of Bucky’s arms, then shakes his head.

“No, I do – I want to. I can’t – I can’t, Bucky.”

The rest gets stoppered up, and a harsh, smoky sound comes out instead.

“OK,” Bucky says. “OK, alright. I get it. S’OK. Let’s get inside, darlin’.”

Clint folds to his coaxing, and has nothing to say about that nickname, and Bucky, he’s mostly just relieved.

It’s sincere, and incredibly true. Hurtfully true.

He means it, every letter, every time.

*

_It sounds like a retired Avenger._

Clint’s grin. Sunshine between rainclouds.

_Am I retired? Are you sure? I don’t remember that._

*

On Christmas Eve, 1943.

Bucky’s pants were around his ankles, reckless rookie, and his mouth was too fucking busy making sounds that filled his own ears, he didn’t hear anything but the wet of his own tongue and a choked in gasp from Gabe before he heard Steve, _Steve,_ saying really, really loudly through the thin tent walls:

“Certainly, Colonel. Sergeant Barnes is running additional inspection – wouldn’t do to run short on ammo, like we did last month now, would it? I’ll be sure to inform him.”

Gabe, fucking sweetheart, didn’t hold it against him, the way Bucky’s teeth briefly scraped his dick as he pulled away.

Bucky scrambled like hadn’t scrambled since the club raid in ’39. There was dirt on his knees inside his pants and Gabe’s eyes were wide and panic stricken as Bucky shoved a finger over his lips and pulled up his pants and sucked in a lungful of muggy air to try and smooth over the roughness he knew would come out when he spoke.

It was a blur, the next ninety seconds. Grappling, scurrying, like a cockroach over a kitchen floor, his heart beating like it was thundering over no man’s land. He could feel the sweat pouring down his back.

Steve was at his post, innocent as a snowdrop, thousand watt smile on his face, and when all Bucky managed was _Got stuck – got left – rifle –_ Steve just clapped him on the shoulder with a smirk that belonged in 1929 and said, “You really ought-a be more careful with your firearms, Buck.”

Said nothing else, didn’t even seem to _blink,_ and there was a fraction of a moment where Bucky thought maybe he’d just gotten real damn lucky.

Only, the way Steve had spoken to Phillips, outside.

 _Loud,_ and with that pointed crispness of his consonants, the same way he used to puff up his chest and bicker at Mr Doyle whenever he called Bucky _That Barnes Boy_ to his face.

There was no way it hadn’t been on purpose.

Bucky, he’d known then, in that moment, known it in the shame-burnt corners of his heart. Steve knew all along, had known, known possibly for longer than Bucky could bear to think of. It had gnawed on his bones, and in his conscience.

He’d never asked Steve, and Steve had never offered up the information freely.

It just sat there, unspoken between them. An undeniable truth.

That Bucky, he was _different._ And not only that, but he’d lied to Steve about it, too.

*

 _Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the army called it, for a while,_ Clint explains, in the roughest overview of history Bucky thinks might ever have been told.

 _Sounds about right,_ Bucky says with a humourless laugh, that Clint reciprocates freely.

*

 _(Sport,_ Howard called him, which was an absurdity that Bucky pretended to be rankled by. Withstood it out of nothing more than loyalty to Steve, and to his younger, starstruck self. “How’s it kicking, Sport?” Howard would say, and Bucky would shrug and say: “I’m hardly your biographer, Stark.” Howard would laugh raucously, and say outrageous things like: “Fitzgerald got all his best ideas from me”, despite the fact that he, like Bucky himself, was only eight years old when Gatsby made it to their shelves. _Cheer up, Sport._ Howard would nudge Bucky’s chin with his knuckles, smiling big. Bucky liked him, maybe a bit too much.)

*

On a shy night, in a dark alley; the taste of gunpowder in his mouth, salt and fright.

“You got anybody waiting on you back home, Barnes?” Gabe asks, breathless with guilt, while Bucky shakes his head, frantic with exhilaration, giddy and hungry.

“You?” he asks, the answer shiny in Gabe’s eyes.

“He died on the front.”

The way Gabe says it, like rehearsed sums in a classroom. Not learnt, or truly comprehended yet, only a memorised fact.

“M’sorry,” Bucky says.

He adds nothing else, because the grief isn’t for him to bear witness to. It’s not a burden Gabe wants to share. Bucky is an escape, and he’s a damn good one. He knows his place in this world, and he likes Gabe, likes him a lot, but he’s not offended to know he’s measuring up short against a ghost.

Gabe’s hands slide down to his hips. All mouth and fingers and strength.

*

With the sun fading fast, and Laura’s bottle almost as empty as his own, Bucky reaches into the back pocket of his jeans and pulls out the photograph with the house address on the back.

Flipping it over, he hands it to Laura, who puts her bottle on the railing beside her to take it with both hands.

“Pepper gave you this?” Laura asks.

Bucky nods, though Laura doesn’t look away from the picture, so he clears his throat hoarsely and says: “Uh, yeah. She did.”

“Is it a dick move, or?” Laura asks, leaving the alternative hanging in the golden air between them. Bucky doesn’t blame her. He doesn’t have a word for the alternative, either.

He looks down at the photo in Laura’s hands.

It’s a nice picture.

Clint is sitting on one side, his legs dangling off the side of the roof, and he’s got a small flowering bruise on his jaw, his hair sweaty and matted but he seems otherwise unhurt. His bow is on his back, and he still has a few arrows poking over his shoulder from his quiver which is strapped into place.

He’s holding half a sandwich in both hands, a bite taken out of it, and he’s smiling open mouthed with laughter as he looks to his left.

His left, where Tony Stark is sitting, still wearing the bottom half of his Iron Man suit, but the top half of his body is wearing only a long-sleeved black shirt. His face and hair are sweat-soaked, too, and he’s holding the other half of the sandwich, but he hasn’t taken a bite yet, his face creased with laughter as he tips his head back.

There’s a ripped empty packet on the roof between them, which reads _Tuna Salad._

“Do you know what this is?” Laura asks, and Bucky blinks away, to look back at her. He shakes his head. “A journalist took it, and a few others, after a fight they were called in on a few months after the Battle of New York. She was going to sell them to a newspaper but Stark’s team intervened, because they were trying to keep Clint and Nat’s faces out of public view and they hadn’t thought anything would manage to get a view of them up there. In the end, Stark just paid twice what they’d have sold for to any paper and kept them for himself. He did it a few times, over the years.”

“He ever get any of Clint and Natalia together?” Bucky asks, and works very hard not to freeze over when he realises that’s a stupidly obvious and suspicious sort of question.

Laura, predictably, gives him a grave look.

“Probably. Why?”

Bucky has made it his mission, over the years, to not lie to this woman. He’s failed her, badly, and he’s kept some terrible truths from her, but he’s never _lied._

He can’t start now.

Bucky drains the last dregs of his beer, and closes his eyes to focus on the last warmth on the sun, even as the evening cool begins to set in. The wind has picked up, bringing with it the smell of salt and sky.

“Barnes,” Laura says, sharper now. She knows something is wrong. “Tell me. Please.”

Her hand is tight on his wrist. His left one – he can feel more, now, with the vibranium arm. More than just pressure, and shock. He can sense the coolness of her fingers. He turns his arm a little, to take hold of her forearm, too.

“Kate Bishop is dead,” he says, because it’s the easier part, after all. Bucky never met her, and he’s managed to convince himself that not knowing her means he doesn’t need to feel anything at all, and it’s true, it’s all true, so long as he doesn’t waste a single second of time thinking about what Clint would feel, if he were here.

Laura’s eyes widen, sparkling.

Bucky takes an emboldening breath.

“And Natalia –” he shakes it off. She’s not, she’s _not._ “She’s not the Nat you remember.”

Laura’s eyes are cast downwards, her neck bowed, a brutal darling weighed down by more than the toils she’s survived. Jesus, how Bucky misses Becca, sometimes, in the darnedest, damnedest of moments.

Laura’s mouth moves, empty of words, around a thought that forms on her face so clearly that it strikes Bucky like lightning from the clouds.

He’s sick with relief, he realises, that Lila isn’t here right now. He hasn’t got a clue what he’ll tell her.

*

He remembers her, as she was. The brittle youngness in her thin hands; the swan arch of her arms. Her pirouettes and the strike of her kicks one and the same, a lethal beauty.

He remembers putting a gun against the back of her head. He remembers how she didn’t flinch, or cry.

She broke his wrist to get out of his grip and she did something, then, that the others didn’t. She looked him in the eyes, though the strands of her red hair. She did not look at her handlers, nor at her reflection in the eastern wall of mirrors, or at her feet in obedient supplication. She looked at her defeated opponent.

She was marble, and ocean, and electricity.

“Natalia,” they would say, and the ribbon of her hair would whip around, scarlet. Her chin dipping to her chest. Her skin shiny, salt and purple.

When he sees her again, in his scope, he doesn’t know her.

He doesn’t know her.

It’s not until she shows up in the middle of the night, a livid angel of vengeful fire.

“I should bury you in a shallow grave and put us out of the misery of your stupidity once and for all,” she hisses, and she’s looking at Bucky, who’s pointing a gun at her head from the kitchen, but she’s talking to Clint, who’s sitting happily on the worktop behind him, eating peanut butter on toast.

“Play nice, puppies,” Clint says, before ducking to avoid the knife Natasha lobs at him.

“He tried to kill me,” she reminds Clint archly.

“You tried to kill me,” Clint retorts with an easy shrug. “Put the gun down, Twinkletoes. We’re all friends here.”

The look Natalia gives Clint is almost as dry as Bucky’s.

*

She’s smart, in all senses of the word. Natasha Romanov.

A day in March, frost on the bluebells outlining the veranda. Natalia steps outside, and she folds her arms in a half hug that Bucky recognises from Clint’s profile in the earliest hours, when sleep is evasive, and his thoughts are unkind.

She says: “In DC. After the attack on the bridge.”

For a moment, Bucky thinks she’s demanding an apology. Until –

“Rumlow’s team took us in. We were in the last vehicle. Hill got us out.”

The air is perishing. Bucky’s eyes sting when he closes them against her words, a meagre blockade. He can sense her attention, the poison of her self-accusation. He knows where this is going. Her voice remains low, thoughtful.

“You were in one of the other vehicles, ahead of us.”

Bucky smiles, unamused, downright displeased to be having this conversation.

It hurts, a kind of pain he’s slowly getting used to. An intangible kind, outside of blades and bullets. It’s a good hurting, the kind of hurting than only people do, not weapons and assets. A better hurt than the wasteland of his brain after a run of volts had burned it clean, a rough hand over a screaming chalk board.

“Steve hasn’t put two and two together,” Natasha tells him, which makes him snort, ungainly.

“You so sure about that?”

Steve’s a smart cookie, too.

When Bucky finally looks at her, Natasha’s mirroring his smile.

“That Steve hasn’t realised he was a few metres behind you and he walked away? Trust me, Sergeant. We’ll know when he realises. Man carries a well of guilt inside him, and it’s ever in need of replenishing.”

Bucky tips his ear to his shoulder, crossing his own arms over his chest. The metal of his left forearm is bitingly cold through his shirt from the unforgiving air. The mechanic shoulder joint is arthritic, groaning.

“Well, he was raised Catholic, like all the other good Irish boys on the block,” Bucky drawls, and he’s not entirely sure if that’s a memory, or a fact he read on a museum wall.

Natasha gives him a conceding nod.

“Got an affinity for guilt-ridden blonds, do you?” she asks with a twitch of her eyebrows.

Their smiles soften, ever so slightly, duller than the knifes they haven’t pulled on each other yet this morning – a first for them both.

“Do you?” Bucky retorts, more defensive than he intends.

Natasha’s eyes – their greenness, their deceptiveness, their truthfulness – all the answer he needs.

*

In 1944, a cracked earth, dry day, after a night of rain.

A small convoy transporting weapons and a handful of P-o-Ws.

The operation is simple enough. They’ve run similar a hundred times already, and it’s just two trucks this time. One for guns, the other for people. The only reason it falls to the remit of Captain America and his Merry Men at all is tat they’re in the area, scouting a HYDRA Base a few miles down the road.

Bucky takes his rifle, a gift of a thieved Lee-Enfield that Monty had winked at him for as he handed it over, and sets up shop in the crevasse of a nearby slope mottled with trees, overlooking the road from east to north to south.

He waits, patiently, and when they get close enough he picks out the tyres: two front, two back, as well as the driver of the first vehicle in the chest.

That’s when the fight really begins.

The Commandos converge, materialising as if from the roots of the surrounding woods, led by the metallic gleam of that glimmering shield that wipes clean of mud and all other foul things so much easier than the rest of them.

 _Captain America:_ _Butter wouldn’t melt,_ Monty teases often when Steve’s playing golden for the cameras. _And blood don’t stick,_ Bucky doesn’t add, because he’s counting his days by the crease of Steve’s mouth. He’s as attuned to this lump of muscles the same as when he’d been a bag of twigs.

And Bucky’s watching, always watching, so it’s Bucky who knows what’s coming before it happens.

They’re carrying the prisoners in the first truck, probably so the second truck can keep an eye out for mischief. Steve and the boys are distracted, taking out volleys of bullets, fighting up close and personal with the few brave and stupid enough to try.

Except, one of the Nazi underlings doesn’t join the rest in the fray.

Instead, the baby-faced weasel takes a couple of pistols and slips away inside the back of the first truck, and Bucky’s heart clogs his throat with a burst of adrenaline – he manages to clip the bastard’s shoulder, but he’s too late, and nobody else has noticed, and the gunshots are lost in the chaos.

Rifle empty, useless, Bucky leaves it on his rocky perch, withdraws his pistol, and starts haring down the hillside. His breath, shaggy in his chest, his ankles turning as he slips in the mud, and he yelps in surprise as he rolls several feet, just as Dernier lets out of _“Woop!”_ of approval in tandem with a loud curse of glee from Morita.

But Bucky, he can taste frantic manic in his words trapped between his gums.

Muddy leaves in his vision, he staggers to his feet shouting _“STEVE!”_ like they’re back in Brooklyn, like he’s racing up the metal staircase because Becca’s been crying and Sarah Rogers is dead.

Steve’s eyes find him as he races down the hill, wide and blue, and there’s a moment of perfect stillness, stillness but for Bucky’s lumbering footfalls, before there’s another BANG! from inside the first truck.

“Shit!” Gabe shouts, and Bucky’s still too fucking far away – _Steve._ Steve has turned around. He’s manic and gasping. He’s tearing into the truck, damn near rips it apart and through the gap even from a distance Bucky sees what they all see.

One last Nazi uniform, a face of nasty triumph, and strewn around him, the wreckage of eleven dead prisoners.

Their hands are still shackled to their ankles.

Steve’s wounded fury rings in Bucky’s ears for months, afterwards.

The boy – the boy, can’t be more than twenty-one, dressed up in his Fuhrer’s colours, his mouth open as he lifts his gun towards it –

He’s too late.

Steve has grabbed him by the leg and hauled him, wrenching his kneecap right out of his socket, his head clattering on the floor of the truck bed with the ferocity of being dragged out into the road.

 _“STEVE!”_ Bucky screams, vaulting over a rock, slips again on landing in the silt of the fallen leaves even as Dugan takes a step towards Captain America – Captain America who has just punched the soldier in his grasp six times in the chest in ascending order, audibly breaking two ribs at a time.

The piercing shriek of the soldier’s agony makes Dugan flinch back – but not Steve, _Steve,_ tears in his eyes, tears in Bucky’s, who can’t run any faster as Steve rears back his fist, punching down and down and down with hate and anger. Chest, throat, chin, nose, forehead.

There’s a wet sound – a gurgle from the soldier, a sob from Steve. Somebody shouts _“Cap!”_ and then, finally, with one final shove of panic, Bucky collides with Steve, tackling him off the immobile soldier and into the roadside.

The sound Steve makes – shock, pain, sheer frustration – rips at Bucky’s bruised heartstrings as he clasps Steve’s wrists, pulling and pushing and for a brief second it seems like Steve’s going to fight him off, before –

“Steve – Stevie – ssh – Steve – no,” Bucky whisper hoarsely, gently, and the rage stiffening Steve’s muscles jellifies.

He collapses, body and spirit, and Bucky puts a hand on his flushed, clammy face. Presses their wet foreheads together, breaths heaving in tandem out of their panting mouths.

“Buck,” Steve gasps.

“Ssh,” Bucky replies, his fingertips digging deep into the side of Steve’s head where the _fuck_ is his helmet, where is his _shield_ – “Just look at me, Steve. You’re just looking at me.”

No force in heaven or hell or this forsaken earth could drag Bucky’s eyes from Steve in that moment. Not the cautious murmur of _“Sarge?”_ from Morita, not Dum Dum wheezing _“Oh, Jesus,”_ following by a heaving splatter of vomit hitting dirt.

It’s just Steve, blue eyes, tear stricken, devastated by the surprise of failure, the bewilderment of such pointless wasted human life, and most of all, a unique kind of horror. _What have I done?_ Steve’s terrified eyes ask, and Bucky shakes his head, and when Steve tries to look away he grips tightly and says:

“No, at me, Rogers. You look at me, you hear me? Just me.”

And Steve, belligerent Steve, headstrong Steve, heartbroken Steve, obeys.

“Bucky,” he says, very quietly, as another tear drips down his face, catching on Bucky’s thumb.

It’s written all over him, ever line and angle of his being.

_How did this happen?_

They kneel in the road, for who the hell even cares how long. Just Steve, and Bucky. A Captain and his Sergeant.

*

Seventy-two years later, that exact same expression, on that exact same face.

Bucky can feel Wilson’s reluctance behind him, full of apologies and excuses, while in front of him –

The morgue in Wakanda, like all morgues, is utterly silent. It’s whistle clean and shiny but at least the lights aren’t fluorescent. They’re a warm, kind shade of gold, catching like a halo in Steve’s greasy hair where he stands, looking down at the half covered body, at – _no._

“Steve,” Bucky says, every ounce of strength not to look down, not to see the body laid out between them. “Please, don’t do this to me.”

It’s like Steve isn’t even breathing. It’s like he’s looked upon the face of Medusa, or been touched by the hand of Midas.

 _What have I done?_ His eyes are pleading.

In Bucky’s lower periphery, almost close enough to touch. He’s there, right there. Bucky need only reach out. Hawkeye. Hawkeye. Clint.

 _They slashed out his eyes,_ Stark snarled three days ago, and if Bucky looks down right now, he’ll never, ever recover.

“How can you do this to me?” Bucky demands.

The thing is, he’s asking Steve.

But he’s also asking Clint.

*

 _So, is there a grave or something?_ Stark asks, a year later.

 _You honestly think he’d have wanted to be buried?_ Bucky wants to snap. _Did you even fucking know him at all?_

He keeps it tucked behind his teeth, because that’s not fair, not fair at all. It’s resentment, at its most toxic.

Besides, the answer, of course, is: _Yes. Yes, I did. Twice as long as you did._

*

 _He loved you,_ Steve says, like it’s news.

He loved a lot of people, more to the point.

*

Bucky forgets it, sometimes, is the thing.

*

 _(They made a Saint Sebastian of him, after all,_ Morita supposedly toasted, the day after Bucky fell into the heart of the Alps. And he wrote it down in his journals, too, later on. A collection of books he bequeaths to his only child, who’s a boy called Andrew Steven. Bucky reads it, in one of the museums, along with a whole other bunch of nice things he doesn’t remember deserving.)

*

One day too bright to be so sad, when the indomitable Ms Potts is making funeral preparations and the world is picking itself back up. When Sam Wilson is finally taking a goddamn day off to spend time with his mom, while the turmoil of those who _lost_ collides with the bewilderment of those who _were_ lost…

Bucky stumbles upon the skulking figures of petite Wanda Maximoff and not so petite Bruce Banner.

They’re clustered together in a secretive littler corner, staring at a holographic screen of Doctor Stephen Strange, the smart-mouth, smug-face wizard. When Bucky walks in, however, they hush-hush the call to an end swiftly, looking guilty. Bucky frowns.

“What’s going on?”

Wanda looks tired, and restless, and confused, and annoyed. Bruce looks – big. Big and sad.

“How about a walk, Sergeant Barnes?” Bruce suggests, and Bucky accepts more out of sheer intrigue than a desire to go outside.

A lot of people call him Sergeant Barnes, these days. It sounds nicer than it used to. Pitted against _Soldier,_ and _Asset,_ and _Moroi,_ a lot of names sound nicer, of course.

He follows Bruce out of the building – a repurposed military facility, only a few miles away from the obliterated Avengers Base. There are acres upon acres of countryside in all directions surrounding them. The air is clean, and warm.

Bruce scuffs his large, shoeless feet on the grass as he walks.

Bucky hasn’t had many dealings with Banner, and he’s mostly disappointed by that.

There’s something uncomfortably familiar about a guy with an alter ego responsible for countless deaths out of his control. Bucky admires the grace of Bruce’s manner, the peace he’s found with a side of himself that has caused him so much pain. Not to mention, Bruce has a soothing, surprisingly jovial presence, despite how subdued he’s been since the death of one of his closest friends.

Outside, now, he’s carrying some of that weight, his right arm tucked in its sling, burnt and shrivelled by the stones that had scorched Tony Stark out of existence.

“What’s on your mind, Dr Banner?” Bucky asks, keeping his eyes on the horizon, but his attention on the looming figure beside him.

“Clint,” he replies, quite simply, before fixing Bucky with a look.

Bucky pauses, a little alarmed.

“What do you mean?”

“When I snapped everyone back – I just. I want you to know, I tried. To bring him back, too.”

Bucky feels all scooped out, like sizzling tarmac of a landing pad in Wakanda. Like Iron Man’s bulk lifting him high into the air. He clings, steadfast, to one simple truth: _He’s not here._ He’s not here.

He’s not here, which means –

“It didn’t work?”

There’s no disguising the tremor in his voice, so he lets it wobble free. There’s no shame in grief. Not for a soldier on the frontlines in the muddy fields of France seventy years ago, and not now.

Bruce shakes his head, his mouth crumpling.

“I don’t know if I did it wrong, or. We’ve looked everywhere. Scanned the bunker where he died, and Wakanda. Everywhere. Nothing. Natasha, she – we think, by sacrificing some part of him to get the soul stone, it meant he couldn’t come back. But we just don’t know. I’m sorry.”

Bucky clenches his jaw, tight enough to feel the creak of his teeth. He remembers cracking them, the ones that are just gaps in his gums now in the back of his mouth, looking for a cyanide pill that never succeeded in implanting. He looks into the white blind blink of the sunshine, face screwed up tight, inching against the instantaneous shattering of newly formed hope.

“Thanks for trying,” Bucky says, and he’s a little taken aback when Bruce scowls at him, and at the sky. His face drawn down, annoyed, angered.

“I should have been there,” he says, through gritted teeth. A gusting breath _whooshes_ out of his deep chest. “I could have been there. If I had just stayed. Steve and Tony were falling apart. Nat lost _Clint_ and I was in _space._ I hope – God. I can’t imagine.”

The earth trembles a little when Bruce falls back to sit on the ground. He’s still, somehow, just about as tall as Bucky, who mees his eyes clearly, confidently, if not comfortably.

“We’d have been there. We would,” Bruce promises.

 _Who?_ Bucky almost asks, before he realises.

Jeez.

_Thor._

Thor, a Norse God, another one who lost Hawkeye, and hadn’t even known it. Sometimes, the world Clint inhabited seems so much bigger than the one Bucky knows, and it’s a terrifying freefall, like plummeting through the Alps. Hawkeye, known, and loved, so fucking _loved._ By gods and geniuses and dogs, by his ex-girlfriend and his best friend and his daughter. By Bucky.

Bucky puts his right hand on Bruce’s left shoulder, as they bow their heads together in a moment of shared loss.

“Thank you,” Bucky says again, without the rest; _thank you for everything._

Bruce’s hand reaches up to pat his, heavy and coarse.

“I hope the future is kinder to us, Sergeant Barnes,” Bruce says and Bucky laughs a harsh, bright laugh. Like a flickering halogen bulb.

“Me too, Dr Banner,” Bucky says. “Me too.”

*

“Natalia,” he says, and the ribbon of her hair whips, scarlet.

Her eyes – their greenness, their flatness, their coldness – all the answer he needs.

“Barnes,” she says, with a simple nod, as if he hadn’t once held her in one arm, and let her silence a shriek of agony into his throat.

*

Laura Shipley sits on the railing of her porch, watching the sun disappear, and Bucky watches her,

The light vanishes, the final dregs from the sky, and in consequence, from her eyes, too. Dark pennies rusted in a wishing well. She’d listened to him in total silence, and finally, cracked, with a choke.

“Shipley,” he says, because there’s nothing else left.

Her hands clasp her knees, her balance immaculate as she leans towards the bruised horizon and screams, tumultuous:

_“FUCK ALL OF YOU!”_

Bucky flinches, but he doesn’t respond.

_“FUCK TONY – AND FUCK STEVE – AND FUCK YOU! FUCK ALL OF YOU!”_

He half expects her to reach out and push him. Blenches his core in anticipation to catch himself.

She doesn’t.

Instead, she closes her eyes and bellows a huge, open throated scream that cuts the evening to shreds. She grits her teeth and punches her thighs, scratching herself through her jeans as she yells: _“SHE WAS THE ONLY ONE! SHE WAS THE – ONLY ONE!”_

Bucky doesn’t know what she means.

And yet, he does. He knows exactly what she means,

He remembers, with peculiar, disorienting clarity, how he finally cried himself out, in that field in Wakanda, and had looked around to see a sunburnt, silent Tony Stark still sitting beside him, just waiting out Bucky’s grief. If Tony Stark had space for Bucky, then, he’ll sure as hell have space for Laura now.

Her voice seems to bounce back off the shore, towards them. The ocean, grieving, too.

It’s magnificent.

It’s right.

*

 _(“Well, if it isn’t our beloved Hephaestion,”_ Colonel Phillips sneered the first time Bucky reported in for duty, standing on the other side of the desk with his back straight, despite the perpetual burning in his ligaments. Phillips looked him up and down, and probably wondered what the hell Steve Rogers needed a sleep deprived punk like this for. _“God forbid we lose you, Barnes. That’s all I can say. History dooms the heroes who lean too heavy on their seconds.”)_

*

In the early spring of 1944, an issue of _Captain America_ is released, entitled _The Twelve Tasks of The Captain._

It’s as transparent as the rest of them, all bright colours, the way nothing is in war except the red of blood and the blue of Steve’s uniformed back as Bucky watches it.

Bucky never pays heed to the comics – they rarely make it to the front lines these days, anyhow. Except, this one time, when he isn’t on the frontlines.

When he walks into a room expecting to find Steve and finds himself looking at the bare feet of Agent Margaret Carter, propped up on a desk as she lounges in a chair. She’s holding a comic, open and aloft, just low enough for her eyes to peer at Bucky over the tops of the pages. Even without seeing her mouth, Bucky knows she’s smiling.

“You won’t tell, will you?” Carter asks, and it’s unclear whether she means her feet on the desk or the comic in her hands.

It doesn’t matter. Bucky smiles, uneasy and trying not to be, and shakes his head: “Sure won’t, ma’am,” he says.

Carter lowers the booklet more, revealing her crimson grin.

“You’re a _pal,”_ she says deliberately, scraping a decent imitation of Brooklyn over the last word. “Looking for Captain Rogers?”

She still hasn’t moved her feet. Her toes are painted a dark, purplish pink.

“Yeah,” Bucky says with an ineloquent stumble into, “Um, yes. Ma’am.”

Agent Carter lets out a dramatic sigh, her curly hair bouncing when she tips her head back, revealing the vulnerable porcelain column of her throat, making Bucky want to wrap her in a scarf or five. It’s almost as if she _wants_ Bucky looking at her.

A hot, angry feeling takes over Bucky’s tightly lidded, oil spill emotions. The way Steve looks at Carter – the was she looks at Steve – she can’t –

Agent Carter pulls her feet back to the floor, sliding them into her shoes, and pierces Bucky with a coppery, intrusive stare. She’s wearing a playful, challenging expression, as if –

As if _daring_ Bucky to look at her, as if testing him for weak spots.

He can’t even bring himself to feel affronted. Jesus _fuck,_ he likes her, maybe so much he hates her, just a bit.

“Me too,” Carter says, shar and abrupt as a needle through a cushion. “Perhaps he’s hiding from Howard again. Mr Stark has been desperate to run some more tests with a new engine model. I actually think Captain Rogers might get fed up of jumping out of planes, soon.”

“Fat chance of that,” Bucky scoffs sarcastically, freezing up immediately.

Before he can retract it, though, Carter laughs, too.

“I suppose you’re right.”

She tosses the comic onto the desk and Bucky glances at the title with idle interest. Seeing his look, Barter hums another half-laugh.

“Seems a bit absurd, doesn’t it??” she asks sincerely. When Bucky looks up at her, she’s more solemn that before.

“What exactly?” Bucky asks, because while he agrees, he rather thinks it’s _all_ a crock of shit. Carter shrugs her shoulders, dainty and determined.

“A Heraklean Conquest for the great American Captain. Don’t they _know_ what happened to Herakles, in the end? He was punished by the Gods and driven to mad violence. Not exactly a hero’s ending.”

Bucky doesn’t know what happened to Herakles, in the end of his story, but the dip of Carter’s brow is deep with tragedy.

“Yeah, well, Herakles didn’t have a team around to carry the weight,” Bucky says, which is blatant guesswork, but he must be sort of right because Carter smiles again, softly, and she doesn’t laugh at him. She clasps her hands on the desk, her head tilted to the side with curiosity.

“He didn’t have a Sergeant, willing to mark his soul up, for him,” she says.

Bucky swallows dryly, and he fights the urge to draw back when Carter leans into her arms on the desk.

“The world owes Steve Rogers a debt,” Carter says. “And the world will do its best to repay him, when the time comes.”

The way she says it, like she _knows._ Like she’ll make it happen. Bucky believes her.

Only, Carter’s eyes sadden considerably as she continues.

“The world owes you a debt, too, Sergeant Barnes. But it won’t ever know truly. It won’t repay you, the way it will Captain America.”

The way she says it, like she knows. Like she’d change it if she could and Bucky, he still believes her.

She he smiles, and it’s easier this time, it means more than it did before. He tells her:

“Never was one to believe in the balance of the universe, ma’am.”

Carter’s lips twist, first in a grimace and then a bigger smile.

“Me neither, Sergeant,” she replies. “But we do what we can.”

With that, Agent Carter stands up, smooths her skirt with both hands, and leaves the room without a backwards glance.

*

“The thing is, HYDRA taught me lots of things. Stuck knowledge in my head, muscle memory in my body. But I was prising secrets out of people long before they got their hands on me.”

Bucky folds his arms around his ribs and lets Clint pull him backwards, into his chest. They lie propped up against a mountain of pillows; the day is bleak and rainy. Clint’s healing up slowly from an Avengers mission gone sideways.

Bucky had watched the news footage on the TV with Laura, and pretended not to know Lila was camped out on the stairs, eavesdropping through the door.

Now, Clint’s got hold of him and Clint, unflinching Clint, there’s not a single thing Bucky could say that will make him turn aside.

His mouth, warm on the side of Bucky’s neck. They are equals.

“Did they ever give you the choice?” he asks, and he isn’t talking about HYDRA, no siree.

Bucky laughs, unclogs his throat with a weak sound.

“Carter asked, once, if I needed to stop.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her that Herakles should have had a Sergeant.”

Clint doesn’t ask, and Bucky’s selfishly relieved. He’s not sure he could explain anymore, even if he wanted to.

*

When Peggy Carter dies, Clint takes one look at Bucky and says: “Even if we go to London, you cannot go to the funeral, Buck.”

Bucky chokes on the resigned gratitude that explodes inside him.

“He’ll be so alone,” is all he can think to say, which isn’t even true because Wilson will probably be there, even if the rest of them aren’t.

Clint sighs, looking thoughtful, and glances out of the window. Purses his lips, the way he does when he’s feeling guilty.

“Let me talk to Lila. We can leave tonight.”

Bucky near cuts his lips, bruising his mouth with his own. Kisses him like breathing and like drowning, all at once.

*

Six weeks later, Steve wakes up, in a hospital bed in a Wakanda.

 _He loved you,_ he says, and Bucky nearly screams.

Cause and effect. It’s the nature of things, a kind of imbalance that never quite aligns.

*

“You staying?” Laura asks, eventually. She’s starlit, shivering a little. A brutal darling with firefly eyes.

“Just the one night,” Bucky says, an apology and an oath.

Laura takes his hand with cold fingers and leads him inside. Bucky follows, the scent of the Pacific following them into the house. The world is fixing itself, very slowly. They will, too.

He pulls on a thieved sweater and fucks up the alphabetisation of Laura’s bookshelves and he flinches when the front door opens and slams suddenly and a voice is shouting:

_“Mom! Mom! There’s a fucking jet outside, is someone –”_

He turns around, because he can’t do anything else.

Clint Barton’s daughter is standing in the doorway, full to the brim with tears in her grey glitter grin.

“JB?” she whispers, like a little girl from a hundred years ago, all grown up. “It’s you.”

A sob hiccups out of her skewed mouth.

Bucky takes a shaky breath.

“Yeah, Lila. Yes, sweetheart. It’s me.”

*

**Author's Note:**

>  **Some referenced names given to Bucky, in case you’re interested and/or confused:**  
>  “Azrael” – Name in Judaism for the Angel of Death, translation from Hebrew is “Angel of God”. (Given the context of HYDRA and its origins in the Marvel universe within WW2 and the Nazis, I appreciate this is a particularly viciously chosen name and I acknowledge that. I hope I haven’t offended anyone.)  
> "New and brighter fire” – The full title of Mary Shelley’s classic “Frankenstein” is “Frankenstein; or, A Modern Prometheus”. If Zola was the ‘newer new Prometheus’, that would make his pièce de résistance (the ‘Fist of HYDRA’) the equivalent of Prometheus’ fire – a gift to humanity.  
> “Chimaera”/“Little brother of “Cerberus” – Chimaera is a creature in Greek mythology that is a hybrid of animals, and is referenced sometimes to being a sibling of such creatures as Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded Hades’ Underworld. The origin of the idea of a Hydra as a many-headed water monster is another such sibling creature.  
> “Florestan” – A character from Beethoven’s Opera “Fidelio”. Florestan is the husband of the titular character. He is thought to be dead by the other characters during a large portion of the story, but he is in fact alive and a prisoner.  
> "Petrushka" – An archetype of Russian folk puppetry, chiefly known as the titular character of Stravinsky’s 1911 ballet. In Stravinsky’s story, Petrushka (or, Petruchka) is a puppet that is kept in a dungeon when not in use. He falls in love, is rejected, loses a duel and dies – returning as a ghost in the story. Petrushka is also a homonym for Parsley in Russian.  
> “Koschei” – Russian folklore archetypal antagonist, sometimes known as “Deathless”. Koschei etymologically might come from “koshchii”, one meaning for which is ‘slave’ or ‘captive’. Or “Koshey”, which is a Slavic term used for a military officer from 12th century onwards. The figure of Koschei probably also partly inspired JK Rowling’s idea for “horcruxes” as using objects to hide soul fragments to cause longevity.  
> “Bullseye” – The name of Bill Sikes’ bull terrier in Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist”. Bullseye is forced to abandon Sikes when Sikes turns on him (attempting to drown him) in order to escape the authorities, because he doesn’t want to be recognized as easily. (I’d argue HYDRA would have basically done this to the Winter Soldier, if Insight had been successful, or perhaps if they’d gotten him back after it failed.)  
> “Buck” – The name of the canine hero in Jack London’s “Call of the Wild” who is stolen and sold, forced to work and fight in the harsh frozen wilds of North America. In the original book, Buck eventually becomes a Native American legend called the “Ghost Dog”.  
> “Patroclus" – The friend of Achilles who fought alongside the hero in the Trojan War (generally speaking nowadays acknowledged to be his lover) who dressed as Achilles to fight Hektor and died in his place. / Alternative inspiration: Patroclus is also the name of a Saint whose persecutors tried to drown him. He briefly escaped, but was ultimately recaptured and beheaded at Troyes.  
> “Sport” – The nickname given to the narrator Nick Carraway by Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”. While TGG was published in 1925, it was not hugely successful or popular until a resurgence of it in WW2 (post Fitzgerald’s death), so some poetic license is used here for it to be quite so well known by Howard and Bucky already during that time.  
> “St. Sebastian” – Not a reference to Sebastian Stan. St. Sebastian is often depicted as being martyred by being pierced by many arrows. This did happen, however it isn’t actually how he died. He recovered from this would-be execution, and was later beaten to death when it was discovered by the Emperor that he was still alive. There’s a statue (San Sebastiano Fuori Le Mura) in Rome, where his remains supposedly are.  
> “Moroi" – A ghost and/or vampiric creature from Romanian folklore. A possible etymological origin for the name is the Old Slavonic word ‘mora’, meaning ‘nightmare’.  
> “Hephaestion” – (son of Amyntor) The second in command of Alexander the Great, possibly his lover at least in adolescence if not later life. Alexander died only a few months after Hephaestion, and was believed to have been driven mad with despair by his closest friend’s death – some extreme romantics would suggest Alexander’s death was caused by the recklessness of his life after losing Hephaestion…I suppose this can’t be entirely disproven. (Of course, I doubt Phillips would have bought the homosexual heroes edition of that story.)  
> *  
> It’s pure indulgence that of course the book Sarah Rogers gives Bucky for his birthday, “The Last of the Mohicans”, has a character called “Hawkeye”.


End file.
